Will never get over this. Cases are high, a new, more virulent strain is on the horizon. Masks don't shutdown economic activity, they make it more possible.
This isn't even wishful thinking - it is straightforwardly pro-COVID policymaking.
Future historians: "While almost all politicians declared themselves to be opposed to the pandemic, a de facto split emerged between those who proposed actions to curb it's spread, and those who blocked or reversed such actions."
WI GOP rushed to remove a state mask mandate without even a hearing. And now it will cost low-income families $50M in benefits tied to COVID relief. jsonline.com/story/news/pol…
The WI GOP figured out their face mask ban would cost the state $50M. So now they are passing an amendment that would keep the ban, but require the governor to pass a meaningless health care order to get the money. Governing!!
What is the most memed Simpsons episode? Not the best, or your favorite, but the one with the most number of canonical lines per minute?
Gonna propose Bart Gets Famous:
"Say the line Bart"
"Impaled on my Nobel Peace Prize"
"You'll have to speak up. I'm wearing a towel."
"My boy's a box! Damn you! A Box"
Also:
"They're not gone. You're gone"
"No thats Danish"
"This is the music you tighten up to"
"Pepe, go for the face"
Larry Hogan is still Governor of Maryland, but TBF Covid is blocking Tom's primary source of information - a humble taxi driver with sharp geopolitical insights.
Tom Friedman on the phone to local health officials
This is a long-standing ethical debate - do you choose exit, voice or loyalty under an incompetent leader? - precisely because its very hard to prove the counterfactual. But in this case, the pros of having one of the world's best public health scientists in the room seems clear.
Stopping the President from acting like a jackass or managing the palace intrigues are obviously central in the narratives of political reporting, but perhaps the wrong criteria for evaluating public health officials.
Exactly this - in some cases exit would help draw attention to an issue. But exiting during a pandemic seems incredibly costly if you play a central role in public health (which Fauci does)
Cool study! A key point in looking at lots of studies of frictions is that sometimes nudges are not enough. Nudges help if the problem is attention or learning costs. But sometimes people need direct help with system characterized by high compliance costs - or a simpler system!
One contribution of the administrative burden literature is (I hope) to move away from a "nudges work" or "nudges don't work" duality, where people line up as being pro- or anti-nudge.
Administrative burdens have different types of costs. Nudges help with some, but not others.
A useful contribution social scientists can make is to identify which type of cost (learning, compliance or psychological) affects program take-up, because that implies different solutions. Sometimes a low-cost text msg works, sometimes you need to scrap and fix a broken system.
Blanket bans on former Trump officials are excessive. However, it is a perfectly reasonable policy for universities to not give a platform for people who worked to undermine US democracy. washingtonpost.com/education/2021…
Wrote about this the day after the Capitol insurrection, anticipating that universities would communicate to their stakeholders the importance of democracy, while still accommodating people opposed to democracy.
Grennell took active part in Trump's construction of the Big Lie. He held a press conference alleging mass voter fraud in Nevada. The night of the Capitol insurrection he was on Hannity, still pushing the claim of election fraud that drove the mob.
A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/
Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/
Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/ washingtonpost.com/politics/biden…