Quick take: Biden's Address
I posted something a little while back stating, essentially, that Biden's policy agenda is little more than a large pile of small things creating the appearance of scope because of the collective price tag without anything truly interesting or important. After last night's speech, do I stand by that assessment?
Yes.
To reiterate my basic framework, modern American liberalism put its last big piece into law with the passage of the ACA, and since then, the left has struggled to redefine itself. If they had a concrete vision of what a policy regime should be, then the closer they came to achieving it, the more classically conservative they should become, defending their gains. Instead, they are casting about looking for new goals in self-redefinition.
The result? Lots and lots of little stuff. Nothing close to the conceptual change of the ACA. What do I think of it? I mostly don't give a shit. Some of it, I like, some I don't, and mostly, this is an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Big stuff matters, little stuff doesn't. We're not done with COVID, and Biden is managing that about as well as one can. Right now, this is about convincing idiots to get their fucking shots, but we're hitting a wall. So here's a proposal, because I don't value one life over another based on nationality. If American assholes won't get their shots, give the extras to India, where it's worse. Save some fucking lives. If they'll take the shot and a fucking redneck won't, OK. Vaccines for India!
That said, climate change matters. Penny-ante policy changes don't. What about when the collective price tag is big? That just means it won't happen. It doesn't mean he's thinking big. It means it won't happen.
Would climate change legislation happen? No. Work through the regulatory process, executive orders, and take advantage of the expansion of executive power that took place under the last administration.
Everything else is for show, and it's not a very good show. At least he isn't on board with this "Defund the Police" batshittery. I'm curious how long the dam holds within the Democratic Party on that.
I personally favor distributing extras to the Americas. South America has an outbreak as bad (per capita) if not worse than India's, but the scale is small enough that tens-to-low-hundreds of millions of doses would make a difference in community transmission. India is so big that vaccines (less than, say, 300 million of them) would only protect those individual people getting them; that's great, but the knock-on effects of getting closer to herd immunity get us more bang for the buck in the Americas. I think of it like dropping water on fires; the giant fire would take 1000 loads to put out, but if we only have 100 loads, we might be more effective by dropping that on 5 smaller fires, which would enable local fire crews to put those out before they grew bigger.
ReplyDeleteRight now, Mexico seems to be doing well enough. Canada can be left to their own devices. Chile has a solid vaccination program. Argentina and Uruguay are really interesting--they seem to be doing pretty decent at getting shots in arms, but are still having a surge--those might be places that can both use the extra doses well AND maybe start knocking on the herd immunity door and really nip this in the bud there. After that,
Oddly enough, it almost makes sense to concentrate vaccines up to a point (which the US is nearing) to let the magic of herd immunity do as much work as possible. I think I've seen estimates that we can only produce 2-3B doses of vaccines this year. Rather than spreading those 28% around the globe, it might make more sense to go for 70% in one place, then the next, and so on.
Now, a HUGE caveat is that, at the end of the day, South America (and Africa, but COVID seems to be pretty good there, probably for the reason I'm talking about) is less connected to the rest of the world. That might be a reason to focus on India--those connections are potential vectors.
I think the best way to proceed would be to use complicated models. Of course, what will ACTUALLY happen is that the US will stockpile these things and waste time trying to convince Americans to take them.
I have actually been thinking about the drop-in-the-bucket issue with India, and the marginal utility question. Someone has crunched the numbers on this, but I haven't seen the formal analysis. I could believe that there are more lives saved, per vaccination, giving the extras to somewhere other than India, where it is so out of control, and the do-the-most-good philosophy says to do that. The other perspective is that India is now a world collective action problem. Of course, empirically, America will stockpile the extras and tell everyone else to go fuck themselves. America, Fuck Yeah!
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