12: Super Tuesday, Coronavirus, and Meta-rationality
A news recap edition: "If you gaze long into the abyss of a disease, your own ideology gazes back at you."
Hello, friends,
This week’s newsletter is a news recap, more or less. There were two big stories this week, the 2020 presidential primary election and the continued spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 ) and it’s disease (COVID-19).
Super Tuesday
It was Super Tuesday this week. Fourteen states and American Samoa, a territory the US annexed in 1900 whose inhabitants are still considered “merely nationals,” but not citizens, voted in the 2020 presidential primary. Joe Biden did surprisingly well winning 10 states, including Texas. Joe Biden is now the frontrunner to become the Democratic nominee. Sure, as Hatlem put it on Jacobinmag.com:
“For all the talk of Joe Biden’s inevitability, the former vice president has won 45 percent or less of the delegates pledged to date. When the dust has settled on Super Tuesday ballot counting, his 50–75 delegate lead over Vermont senator Bernie Sanders will be smaller than Barack Obama’s more-than-100-delegate lead over Hillary Clinton at the end of February 2008. And it is far smaller than Clinton’s 224 pledged delegate lead over Sanders after Super Tuesday in 2016. Both of those races continued through June, and we should expect that 2020’s Democratic nomination process may well be even more competitive.”
I don’t buy it: Biden is the frontrunner, youth turnout is low with most Super Tuesday states seeing either flat or decreasing votes from those younger than 30, and Biden is getting all the endorsements he needs, including the Democratic governor of Michigan, which votes this upcoming Tuesday. A little over 100 pledged delegates are still to be allocated from Tuesday, but, according to AP and Bloomberg.com, Biden has a strong lead with 664 total pledged delegates, as shown in figure 1.
Figure 1: Bloomberg.com (March 7, 2020).
The next states to vote—Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington—on Tuesday, March 10 are predicted to largely go to Biden with the exception of Washington and maybe Idaho. And FiveThirtyEight now gives Biden an 89% chance of winning the Democratic nomination which likely means the next president of the US is Donald Trump.
The Wildcard: Elizabeth Warren
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who dropped out on Thursday, could endorse Bernie Sanders. According to a Morning Consult poll, some 43% of her voters choose Sanders as their next preferred candidate, and some think even more of her voters could help Sanders rally the progressive wing of the Democratic Party behind Bernie. By reviewing Warren’s recent attacks on Bernie and his supporters, I find this possibility increasingly unlikely.
Sanders has a chance but it’s a slim one. Check out Micah Cohen, managing editor of FiveThirtyEight.com giving the best-case scenario for Bernie Sanders:
Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)
Obviously the biggest story in the world is the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19. As of this writing, we have 102,478 confirmed cases across 100 countries and 3,491 confirmed deaths. These numbers are tentative, particularly the confirmed cases, but this would give COVID-19 a mortality rate of 3.4 percent. Italy is preparing to “lockdown” the north of its country which would “restrict movement for a quarter of the population”; has already banned fans from attending sporting events for at least a month (USA Today); and has “ordered all schools closed until March 15,” a decree that will probably be expanded for many if not most Italian schools (Wall Street Journal.) In China, a hotel used to quarantine folks has collapsed, with hundreds reported as injured at this point; and in Xinjiang province, where millions of Uighur Muslims are already facing horrifying and evil repression, slavery, and forced detention, are being treated even worse now that the coronavirus gives the Communist Party of China a pretense to do so.
In the US, there are 370 confirmed cases (this goes up every hour) and 19 dead (this goes up every day); the latest state to report its first death is Florida; and the states of California, Washington, Utah, and New York have declared “states of emergency.” Stanford University has canceled classes for the next two weeks, and more and more cases are being confirmed hourly. As I was writing this I saw that an attendee of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has tested positive for COVID-19; this event, hosted by the Conservative Political Union (CPU) in Maryland last week, was attended by possibly 19,000 people, including Vice President Pence and President Trump and 20 other Trump administration officials (and at least 18 other Republican members of Congress, by my quick count).
Congress passed, and President Trump signed, an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. Per Axios, the bill includes
$3 billion for developing treatments, including $300 million for the government to purchase drugs from manufacturers at “fair and reasonable” prices.
$2.2 billion for public health measures to help prevent its spread.
More than $1 billion to be sent overseas.
This bill will help but the U.S. healthcare system is not up for the challenge. And new reports (see MIT Technology Review; and the Washington Post) on the testing rollout debacle are a national embarrassment. Moreover, working people—read over 40% of American households—have low wage work, no paid sick leave, and potentially face immorally high hospital bills (who won’t charge for test, but do charge for….you entering the facility) which will also have perverse effects. Last night, PBS Frontline had a sobering segment on this reality facing tens of millions of Americans who live in a perpetual Catch 22:
Liz Specht, a PhD in biology, had a disturbing yet measured and conservative tweet thread (36 tweets) on some possibilities of the next few months regarding healthcare capacity. Here is the first set of tweets:
Click on any of the above tweets to follow the rest of her thread. She looks at hospital bed capacity, the availability of masks, and the risks that frontline healthcare workers face right now. Another important person to follow on Twitter is Helen Branswell, a preeminent infectious disease journalist who is highly touted and respected.
Good Reads on Coronavirus
“The Coronavirus is Not Mother Nature’s Revenge,”
Alan Levinovitz, ForeignPolicy.com (March 5, 2020).
This is most stimulating and thought-provoking essay I’ve read on the coronavirus and COVID-19 this week was by Alan Levinovitz, an assistant professor of Chinese philosophy and religion at James Madison University, on ForeignPolicy.com. The subtitle of this week’s newsletter—“If you gaze long into the abyss of a disease, your own ideology gazes back at you”—comes from it.
“U.S.-Chinese Distrust Is Inviting Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories,”
Yanzhong Huang, ForeignAffairs.com (March 5, 2020).
Good Listens on Coronavirus: an update
Pandemic podcast with Dr. Celine Gounder, and Ronald Klain
This Podcast Will Kill You, Ep. 43 M-m-m-m Coronaviruses
- My friend Dr. Karena Nguyen, a postdoctoral scholar studying disease ecology at Emory University, sent me an email after last week’s coronavirus newsletter. She recommended this podcast which she writes is from “two of her favorite disease ecologists.” The podcast covers the world of infectious diseases and has been active since early 2018. Over three seasons they cover HIV/AIDS, yellow fever, malaria, the Blackdeath, the virtues of anti-biotics, vaccines, and even aspirin across 45 episodes so far.
Meta-rationality
I leave you all this week with a quote from a conversation I watched this week between Tyler Cowen and Tim Ferriss. They were discussing ways that one can check one’s priors, one’s assumptions, and one way is acquiring the skill of metacognition and meta-rationality.
“A person is being meta-rational when he or she understands how smart or well-informed he or she is in a given topic area. Meta-rationality is very hard to come by in my view. So people typically do not defer to the views of expert when they ought to. Sometimes the expert might be wrong but if you are just playing the odds the expert is probably right. So people are far too confident about too many things they shouldn’t be so confident about. Meta-rational people are essentially impossible to find. But at the margin, we can be a bit more meta-rational. They know to whom they should defer or how to find out the right answer.”
We can all hope to become a bit more meta-rational. For those who’d like to listen/watch the conversations, here it is:
The meta-rationality part starts at 5:30.
~
Keep looking up,
Patrick M. Foran