WHAT A LOSS FUNCTION ARGUMENT LOOKS LIKE.

Paul Romer, who economists might know better as one of the gurus of growth theory, has suggestions for keeping track of coronavirus patients that involve sensible testing and relatively little contact tracing.

The testing is more important for workers in health services and related fields. "When someone tells you that 'we could never test that many people,' ask 'ok, so your plan is to stand by and do nothing as asymptomatic spreaders kill their colleagues?'"  That might be harsh, but it's compelling people who object to consider the trade-offs they'd rather make.

The contact tracing sounds appealing to people of a technocratic bent, but there's a problem with large data bases.  "Check in on the folks who will still be arguing about how to implement some kinda sorta obligatory tracking system.  Ask them how they are doing with getting the members of QAnon comfortable with their scheme."

On the other hand, the remedy he suggests for people who test positive, once testing of the entire country becomes feasible, includes a suggestion that every household repurpose its bug-out-bag as a stay-in-bag.  "When you strip away all the noise and nonsense, note that once we cover essential workers, its easy test everyone in the US once every two weeks. Just do it. Isolate anyone who tests positlve."

BET ON EMERGENCE.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "Central Planning Didn’t Flatten the Curve."  It's not clear yet how the plague is playing out (and the alleged good news out of China is going to last about as long as those cheap vacuum cleaners at Walmart).

It’s almost surely the case that the models were wrong to one degree or another for the simple reason that any model is only as good as the data fed into it. With imperfect information — partly thanks to the outrageous dishonesty of the Chinese government and the grave missteps of the World Health Organization — it was inevitable that the models would never be more than best guesses. We’re far from out of the woods, but the fact that “only” some 60,000 Americans may die instead of 240,000 seems like something to celebrate, not an excuse to scapegoat officials who scrambled to save lives.

Modelling is even more difficult when you're starting from scratch: very few cases to extrapolate from, and of necessity a large margin of error.  And, yes, policy people have to have some sort of basis from which to extrapolate, and the people who hold the levers of power, er, the monopoly on violence, might have to claim some basis for their authority.  The Favor of the Gods went out either with Ragnar Lothbrok or Louis XVI.

Still, there’s an interesting assumption common to both sides of the debate: that the government is responsible for all of this. Both defenders and the critics start from the premise that government diktats are the only variable here.

My American Enterprise Institute colleague Lyman Stone, an economist based in Hong Kong, makes the case that the essential variable in “flattening the curve” isn’t central planning but behavior change. Many businesses closed down well before they were ordered to. Millions of people practiced social distancing and refused to get on planes not because they were commanded to, but because they were convinced this was a wise course of action for themselves and their loved ones.

Yes, and laid in a few spare supplies before the closure orders, and dialed back their social activity.  Mr Goldberg anticipates, correctly in my view, that the return to something resembling business as usual will also be emergent.

Information doesn’t just come from governments. The death tolls in Italy and New York probably did more to change behavior on the ground than all of Trump’s press conferences or Dr. Anthony Fauci’s TV appearances.

And this raises another complication for those who think the government can just “re-open” the economy with the flick of a switch. Trump and all of the governors could lift the stay-at-home orders and federal advisories tomorrow. That wouldn’t necessarily fill the restaurants, airplanes, or stadiums. People would still need to be convinced it’s safe. Such persuasion comes via clear, believable information, not orders from on high.

And that’s how it should be in a free society.

Amen.

ALL HAIL THE MESSIAH, JOE BIDEN, JOE BIDEN.

That's the kind of boilerplate one expects when the runners-up in the primary endorse the party's putative nominee.

When citizens write such things, doesn't that put the whole universal-suffrage idea in doubt?

What is clear is that leading this country through the coronavirus pandemic is not something the current occupant of the White House is capable of, and we cannot count on him for what this country will need going forward. After the devastating toll this virus will inflict, we will need a president who can help this nation heal and come back from this crisis. Only Joe has the decency, humanity and history to do that for us now.

Or, at a minimum, that there is herd immunity among the electorate to such naïve participation in the Cult of the Presidency.

SOME INTERESTING PROJECTIONS ABOUT THE FAST TRAINS OF EUROPE.

The business consulting firm UBS Research is already thinking about After.

[A]nalysts found that governments would ‘pursue the expansion of high speed rail’, with more than €100bn being invested in the European Union and more than 800bn yuan spent in China, generating ‘incremental demand for new equipment to boost speeds and density’. They estimated that there would be ‘revenue opportunities’ worth €40bn to €60bn in Spain, France, Germany and Italy over the next 10 years. This could slow global air traffic growth to 4∙6% a year over the 2018-28 period, they believed, although ‘every player is exposed in the air travel, rail and auto sectors’.

To some extent that's being driven by flight-shaming. The article doesn't reveal whether the report anticipates airlines continuing to shoehorn more people into the same hull, and the partial effects of all those extra travellers breathing into the same recirculated, positive-pressure air.  The closing line is instructive.  "Service and frequency are key drivers of demand for longer train journeys, and ‘both can be improved when competition among operators is introduced’."  You mean, for instance, a reprise of the Race to the North, or perhaps, in North America, the reintroduction of the Royal Blue Line to keep The Pennsylvania Railroad, er, Amtrak Northeast, on its toes?

THE POLITICIAN'S IMPLICIT LOSS FUNCTION THEOREM.

That's what politicians have, even if they don't specify it and evaluate the power of their policies against Type I and Type II errors.  But being a pundit evidently means you can read into politicians acting on what they're implicitly weighing in such a way that riles up your base.  Chris Hayes tried to dunk on Our President, for instance.

“The most cynical interpretation of all this, one I can’t quite bring myself to accept,” wrote Hayes, “is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that # and take a vicotry(sic) lap when ‘only’ tens of thousands died.”

That "sic" is Mediaite's Caleb Howe, attempting to document the dunking, as well as Mr Hayes's subsequent "But I really meant to say" clarifications.

In his subsequent replies, the defensive Hayes attempted to mitigate the conspiratorial tone, perhaps in the hope of softening the implicit indictment of Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who likewise touted and and described the models and charts at length to the American people.

“I think I’d distinguish between the integrity of the model and the good faith reasons for them using,” he wrote in a reply, “the macabre strangeness of it as this very explicit benchmark of ‘success’ that he articulates over and over as thousands of ppl die.” Between the things he was distinguishing between was a parenthetical. The good faith reasons “(which I don’t actually really question)” he wrote, now that he was done questioning them in his tweet that had, at the time of this post, 3,700 retweets and almost 15k likes. (By comparison, his hastily inserted, sorta-kinda walk-back had 1 retweet and 14 likes. Not 14k. Fourteen.)

Team Twitchy, predictably, is less kind.

Power Line's John Hinderaker grasps that there is a loss function.

Hayes has been widely denounced for floating a conspiracy theory. But what some call conspiracy, I call politics. Did politicians know that early estimates were wildly off base? It depends on what the meaning of “know” is. And, actually, President Trump set the bar at a reasonable level when he referred to 100,000 deaths. That is far lower than some of the early projections.

Hayes, given his partisan orientation, confined his speculation to the Trump administration. But what about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are poised to claim credit for limiting COVID-19 fatalities? Here in Minnesota, our governor preposterously alleged that absent his actions, there would be 74,000 deaths in our state. The actual count, as last recorded by Scott: 39. Do you think any Democratic governor or mayor will fail to take credit for lives allegedly saved?

All incumbents, regardless of party, share a common interest in citing bad model predictions and claiming credit for the models’ failure to describe reality. No doubt self-isolation measures have helped to some degree, but it will be easy for politicians to give their policies credit for what largely is attributable to models that were wrong in the first place, just like prior models for prior epidemics.

Politicians quickly figured out that there was little down-side to taking harsh, economy-killing measures. They could be blamed for doing too little, when the inevitable deaths occurred, but who would blame them for doing too much? As the feckless Andy Cuomo said, if we save just one life, destroying our economy and devastating the lives of millions is worth it.

That is, until people start asking whether the consequences to the lives of the healthy yet unemployed, or confined to quarters in a less-than-happy-family begin to outweigh the gains from taming the contagion.

Augustana of South Dakota's Robert E. Wright reinforces that point: making policy based on worst-case scenarios might make a lot of sense, particularly where there's some popular sovereignty and people who pretend they're doing a heckuvajob when the facts suggest otherwise don't last long in elected office.

Specifically, if politicians do not act and the novel coronavirus burns out, like some epidemiologists argue it would anyway, the world is pretty much unchanged and a “serious crisis” is left unexploited. If politicians remain inactive and the stench from the crematoria make the living long for death themselves, well, then, there will be hell to pay at the polls, or the poles.

If politicians act and the outcome is good, they can take credit and campaign on it for re-election, as many former military officers on both sides did by “waving the bloody shirt” of the Civil War for decades afterwards. A big win in other words.

If they act and the outcome is bad (i.e. if lots of people die) and again this is round one of the way politicians think, they can always portray it as a (comparatively) good come out with the refrain that “it’s a good thing we did something or this would have been much worse.” Some people will accept, while others reject, the validity of the statement—probably along party lines, so the expected outcome is better than in either of the two inaction squares.

I'd carp that "waving the bloody shirt" is anachronistic, as you still have people of a technocratic bent invoking the New Deal or Great Society or Civil Rights as the case for their Suitability to Rule.  I also suggest that you read the full essay, as what he has to say about what comes next, namely, we're in uncharted territory when it comes to balancing a safe restart against continued shutdowns.  Keep in mind, though, that the controversy over the excessively high initial forecasts of deaths is in part a recognition of individual rationality at work.  How many people might have observed the developments from China and Italy and laid in a few extra household supplies and cans of food, and dialed back on the travelling and participating in community festivals before the official orders took effect?  Likewise, how many people might weigh the evidence on the easing up of confinement orders and behave more prudently than officialdom endorses?

I'll give Legal Insurrection's Leslie Eastman the final word.

I assert that it is not a “conspiracy theory” when people fail to comprehend explanations that are unclear, vague, out of context, or not presented in a manner that can be readily understood. The failing belongs on the shoulders of the explainers. In my view, they are the media and the scientific members of the Task Force.

Or, as we counsel aspiring university teachers, " if you can't explain it to your mother-in-law, you don't understand it well enough."  The stakes are pretty high: if public officials, whether in the White House, state Capitols, or the various city halls, can't make clear what the exit strategy looks like, and what the benchmarks are, their failure to do so will lead to civil disobedience, and, just like any other exponential process, it will be just a little at first, then all at once.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY MAYOR LIGHTFOOT IS THREATENING LIQUOR STORES AND FRISBEE PLAYERS WITH FINES.

Empty streets mean idle red-light cameras – and budget holes.

The Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank, estimated in 2017 that Chicago generated $54.4 million in revenue from red-light cameras.

“In terms of the whole city budget it’s a small piece, there’s absolutely no question, but that translates into a healthcare clinic, that translates into enrichment programs,” said Kent Redfield, an emeritus political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Chicago’s red-light camera program began in 2003 and the General Assembly approved legislation to allow them in the suburbs in 2006. While municipal officials have said the cameras are about public safety, critics of the red-lights contend they are more about generating money for local municipal budgets.

Yes, and those drones with the Voice of Big Brother telling you to get off the beach are For Your Own Good, too.  "The story goes on to present other manifestations of Expertise Hiding Behind Credentials (Shut Up, Peasant) in a way that suggests being skeptical of Technocratic Visions isn't necessarily problematic."  The extension to the current shutdown of ordinary life and the retrieval of what can be retrieved is straightforward.

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE.

At the close of the fall 2019 academic year, Oregon's Mark "Economists View" Thoma announced his retirement.  Unlike me, he simply closed shop, no repurposing, no continued management of the mainstream press.  Perhaps somebody bought him whatever his version of a train set would be, and he's simply enjoying the calm.

THE YEAR WITHOUT BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTS.

It's a wonderful opportunity to engage in what-ifs. ESPN's BPI projects Wisconsin as would-be NCAA champ.

Their simulation, which considers "the relative strength of the two teams and the location of the game" for every single game in the bracket predicted that...Badger fans, brace yourselves....WISCONSIN could have been crowned NCAA champions, beating out No. 6 BYU for the rights to hang a banner in the Kohl Center.

ESPN's Seth Walder, who put this exercise together, explained in his article that normally, BPI is used to provide probabilities of multiple scenarios.

But here's the thing," Walder wrote. "Life is a single sim. The 2020 tournament was only going to be played once. And so that's what this article is actually dedicated to: a solitary simulation of this year's tournament. One-and-done, just like March Madness."

As we've noted in other contexts, a single simulation ought be considered only as guidance.  I wonder, however, if there haven't been all sorts of impromptu simulations going on.  Instead of the statistician's room full of monkeys, isn't there a country full of players of the various video games with, at the moment, probably lots of time to fill?  What would the frequency count of hypothetical brackets, hypothetical pairings, what have you, yield?

TRAIN YOUR CHILDREN WELL.

Union Pacific are offering a free download of a coloring book featuring parts of the railroad's history, as well as its current role in Moving America.

Thanks again, Union Pacific.

SPELL OUT YOUR LOSS FUNCTION.

That's an obscure and too often neglected part of statistical inference, but it matters.  It's the way the investigator tells readers whether he weights all errors of inference equally, or whether one sort of failure is less desirable than another.  Here, from an old post, is former British prime minister Tony Blair, making the case for ousting Saddam Hussein.

Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.

Nearly twenty years on, perhaps "history" has not forgiven the failure to find those weapons, although somehow the greater error was the hope of the nation-builders that Iraq, and the Levant more generally, would embrace the institutions of the Western Enlightenment.  (Sadly, no.)

PLAYING SMART.

The end of the season might not have been what Northern Illinois women's basketball had aspired to.

That wasn't for failure to make grades.  "The Northern Illinois University women's basketball team earned a conference-high eight selections to the Women's Basketball Academic All-MAC Team."  That included all five graduating seniors.

The conference and national reports on academic performance are not yet out.

The extension to the academic part of the enterprise, Mid-American wide, is the same as it has been.

Now it's up to the young players to continue the tradition.  Perhaps by late October we can start thinking about gathering in the arena again.

I REALLY DO HAVE WATERFRONT PROPERTY!

The decorative pond behind Cold Spring Shops headquarters is posted "No swimming, boating, or skating."  Apparently, though, that didn't deter a kayaker (!) from distancing himself from everybody else.

It would not be wise to tip over in there, as it's often a resting site for large flocks of geese, and all the byproducts originating therefrom.

RETHINKING THE VALUE OF CITIES IN AN ERA OF PLAGUE.

It's the tension between "contagions for good," the possibilities for sharing ideas and exchanging goods in thicker markets, and "contagions for evil," when it's your viruses and bacteria that are being shared with others.

THINK ABOUT REJECTING THE FALSE BINARY.

Why do we let comedians set the tone of political debate.  Here's Serious Reporting involving Joe Rogan.  "Democrats have ‘made us all morons’ by running Joe Biden."  The Soviet Politburo under Late Communism; the Democrat leadership under Late Technocracy, what difference, at this point, does it make?

Mr Rogan, though, is acting under the expectation that others will vote for one or the other of the nominees of the current major parties.

That was Rogan’s response when his guest, Thiel Capital managing director Eric Weinstein, said that “people, when they are given no choice at all, express themselves moronically. I want a choice of an actual president that’s viable. I don’t have one.”

Be part of the coalition of the unwilling.

WE GENERALLY JOKE ABOUT THE CHEDDAR CURTAIN.

In Wisconsin, though, there are people who would like to raise the Sturgeon Bay drawbridge.

Tension rose last week as the local health department reported the first two COVID-19 cases in Door County; both patients are local residents who had traveled recently. At the same time, more out-of-state license plates have been spotted, Lienau said. And yes, many of those plates are from Illinois. The sheriff’s office has fielded calls from people who want the bridges raised (they won’t be). Notes have been left on cars, and out-of-towners have been confronted in grocery stores.

On the Door County Vacationers Facebook page, spats have broken out, where at least one local member joined the page purely to get a sense of how many out-of-towners were planning to come up.

“The only tourists who surprise me are the ones who don’t act like complete sociopaths when they come up here,” wrote Joshua Olson, a Sturgeon Bay nursing student. “Otherwise, their entitlement and disregard for others is the norm.”

That sort of talk used to be good fun, oh, those F'n Illinois B*****ds, clogging our ski slopes, disregarding the no wake buoys, hitting on our girlfriends at the bar.

It could get real.

This is a conversation playing out in resort destinations nationwide: in Cape Cod and the islands in Massachusetts; in the Catskills and the Hamptons in New York; in the Florida Keys, where state troopers have set up highway checkpoints to verify drivers’ residency. The Wall Street Journal has reported on the value of vacation homes in helping to isolate sick or potentially vulnerable family members.

Resort towns have responded by shutting down short-term rentals and reiterating nonessential travel bans. Coastal towns in Michigan likewise are urging would-be travelers to stay home.

If I recall correctly, the bridges linking Door County east of the canal to the rest of the state are movable to permit the movement of shipping, including the military's ships being erected at the shipyard on the east bank. Easier to implement that closure than Rhode Island's attempt to exclude New Yorkers.  Problem is, the only thing worse than F*I*Bs congesting the waterways and buying the beers is no F*I*Bs to spend money.

PERHAPS THEY'LL MAKE THE EXPERIENCE LESS ANNOYING.

Chicago Tribune entertainment writer Michael Phillips asks a serious question.  "If AMC folds, are we done going to the movies?"  It's primarily about the effects of those state lockdowns: the one place you don't want to be is in a closed space with a lot of other people, some of whom might be sniffling, and some of whom might be asymptomatic.

He is envisioning an "after."  As is Chris Johnson, chief executive officer of the suburban Classic Cinemas chain.

For now, Johnson said, the Classic Cinemas ushers and concession counter staff are on furlough, though office staff and managers remain salaried even though, "as I like to say, I’m 100 percent revenue-free at present."

Asked to contemplate a longer shut-down period, well into summer or into the fall, Johnson said that a strong late 2020 rebound would be crucial. Otherwise, he said, "it could be devastating, even though we’re in a better position for a comeback than most. Let’s just say my hope is the holiday season will be bigger than ever, because people will have been cooped up a long time.” Johnson takes heart from longtime customers who’ve bought gift cards as a gift to the movie theaters, as much as to any one friend or relative.

Perhaps it is time for the people who run the theaters to rethink their business model, which seems to be based on upselling at the concessions, and endless commercials. Nearly half an hour of previews? Seriously? We're already doing the theaters a favor by purchasing tickets and their popcorn, and we can tolerate the high prices intended for popcorn lovers at the concessions.  When the scheduled start time for the feature is 1.30, start it no later than 1.35.  Don't make me wait until two.

SCIENCE IS A PROCESS.

Furthermore, by construction, scientific experts are necessarily people who have deep knowledge of a few things.  Purdue's Eric Schmidt clarifies.

Public health experts are not experts in healthcare delivery systems. They are not experts in supply chains or logistics. And most importantly, they are not experts in any economic matters. In fact, many of them seem to bristle when economic tradeoffs are discussed in response to their policy recommendations.

Our media have apparently decided to place all their trust in these public health experts. However, as both a hospital administration professional and a student of economics, I have concerns about handing complete control over to “the experts” due to the constrained nature of their expertise.

It's worse than that, the experts on contagion are advising government officials on how to respond based on their own extrapolations of incomplete information. At least we ought be grateful that the people doing so are noting that with better information (more tests, more knowledge of who is sick and who has antibodies and where they are) their extrapolations will get better.  (Are the environmental alarmists paying attention?)

A FISKING.

I forget whether Tim Blair first came up with the term "fisking" (referring to the line-by-line mockery of foolish statements, originally honoring a useful idiot who attempted to understand why Afghan jihadis beat him up): anyway, he's still a good practitioner of the art.  "The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People's Republic of China, who took gentle issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis."  Just go, read the whole thing (before they paywall it) and keep in mind that one way to deal with the Corrupt Chinese Communist Party is to undermine them with mockery.

Oh, just one excerpt.  The United Nations is mock-worthy as well.  "The World Health Organisation does a lot of stupid stuff."

ON MY WORKBENCH.

Another week of staying out of hell (thanks, J-P Sartre) and working on the railroad.

The model building challenge continues.  It's possible for me, though, to manage a couple of projects at the same time.  (That's the same mind-set as having several research papers in progress and in the pipeline, in case anyone is curious.)

Here's a Locomotive Workshop kit of the Russian Decapod that I've been working on, on and off, for probably twenty years.  I took advantage of the time while paint was drying on the challenge project to solder up the cab front and attach a large Russian-style headlight to the smokebox top.

A firebrick comes in handy when you're soldering with a pencil torch.  My technique is getting better, those are stains on the wood, not scorch marks.

The week's progress on the main project is below the jump.

THE FIRST INSTINCT OF THE PUNDIT CLASS IS TO PUT AN EXPERT IN CHARGE.

For some reason, that Special Functionary, sometimes appointed by a president with no Congressional Approval Necessary, to Take Charge of some Pressing National Issue, goes by the unofficial official title of "czar."  There's usually some more formal sounding terminology, but "czar" is generally what you'll hear, dear reader.

I believe the first such "czar" was William Simon, who had the responsibility of making sure that people got their motor fuel during those early Arab oil embargoes.  Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau, a Member in Good Standing of the Eastern Liberal Establishment (cemented by marriage to NBC's Jane Pauley, no less) had some fun with the concept:

The official perspective was that the Energy Czar had the responsibility of judiciously allocating the available gasoline, and helping the country achieve Energy Independence.  Yes, that was even called "Project Independence," presumably to put the subjects constituents in mind of such achievements as the then-recently-suspended Project Apollo, or for those with longer memories, the Manhattan Project.  In practice, though, the cartoon summarizes what really happened: morally autonomous citizens reduced to the status of grade-grubbing mediocre students, only it's "If I don't get home ..." rather than "If I don't get a B in this course ..."