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11 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
December 11 Omicron update from Europe

- all cases for which there is available information have been asymptomatic or mild
- no deaths so far

It’s the same story everywhere: Too early to draw strong conclusions, but the lack of bad news on severity is good news
Link ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events…
“High transmissibility, high breakthrough rate, low observed severity per infection” has been the story for about a week—and I don’t think I’ve seen anything to change it yet.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Of course

- with a high enough denominator, many cases x lower severity rate could still yield many severe cases

- new evidence can paint a different story
And yet more evidence on higher Omicron transmissibility

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More from @DKThomp

Derek Thompson Profile picture
9 Dec
THREAD

Here is my overview of the week in Omicron news:

- the latest data from South Africa
- the major findings from preliminary vaccine studies
- the lessons of specific outbreaks in Oslo and the NYC anime convention

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
SOUTH AFRICA p1

Case growth is absolutely ferocious, and the evidence of breakthroughs is overwhelming. The estimated reproduction rate is higher than any other point of the pandemic. Omicron is spreading very, very fast right now. Image
SOUTH AFRICA p2

The share of hospitalized patients in the ICU or on O2 is 50% lower than during same stage of Delta. Some evidence that the avg hospital patient is being discharged faster, too.

Read 12 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
8 Dec
I wrote about the myths of the "Great Resignation"

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

1. It's not about "quitting", but low-wage job-switching (ht @JHWeissmann)

2. It actually has very little to do with professional burnout

3. It's more about early retirement than news reports suggest
(1) The Great Resignation isn't actually about what most people think of as "resignations."

The low-wage service-sector economy is experiencing the equivalent of “free agency” in a professional sports league. That makes it more like the Big Switch than the Big Quit.
Restaurants and hotels have been hardest hit by the Great Resignation.

So, are they shrinking?

No! Accommodations and food services added ~2 million employees in 2021! That's almost one out of every three net new jobs this year. They're raising wages and scrambling to hire.
Read 7 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
18 Nov
A novel crypto movement just raised $30+ million in a matter of days to buy a rare Constitution through a decentralized corp.

Even if you think crypto is just stupid—and I don't—a technology for firing a bazooka of money at [anything] seems like an important thing to watch.
Obviously, "firing a bazooka of money at something" is not an unprecedented invention. And crypto is more than just a shadow stock market.

But imagine for one second this movement is *nothing more* than the creation of a gazillion dollars in wealth.

That's massively important!
I follow a lot of smart people who say "crypto has no broad consumer use case right now" and "what's going to be the first killer app here?"

What if the first killer app of crypto is ... an absolutely absurd amount of money? Capable of being deployed for any purpose?
Read 4 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
8 Nov
In the biggest picture, it's pretty ridiculous that US college credentialism increased exponentially in the 20th century ... but the US higher education system stopped making elite physical universities in the 19th century.
An important/interesting exception is the unfurling of the UC system, which got its start in 1868. UCLA was founded in 1919 and UCSD in 1960.



Still means the youngest of the v good physical universities are near Social Security eligibility in age.
what i should have said:

the significance of college attainment in the US economy has grown by a lot during a period in which there's been very scarce expansion, experimentation, or invention in higher ed. no matter what you make of today's news, that's bad!
Read 5 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
5 Nov
One big-picture lesson of the cascade of failures from the CDC, FDA, and the great COVID test debacle is that American science badly needs a scientific revolution of its own.

Our 20th-century institutions aren't enough to guide 21st-century progress.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
This is a piece about Fast Grants—an Operation Warp Speed for scientific funding, from @tylercowen and @patrickc—but it's also about how Fast Grant's success is an important indictment of a big, broken scientific funding system.
I've spent a lot of time the last few months thinking about the problems in the way we fund scientific discovery.

And I think one summary of that reporting is that American science suffers from 3 big paradoxes—of trust, expertise, and experimentation.
Read 8 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
27 Oct
The gap between the "real" vs "observed" economy is an interesting recent theme

2017: Democratic econ confidence dips (but things are fine!)
Late 2020: GOP confidence dips (but things are getting better!)
Today: Consumer sentiment in the dumps (but the economy's kinda booming!)
I don't want to overplay the boominess of the economy. Gas prices are up, the supply chain's a mess, buying a car is a nightmare, etc.

What's interesting, however, is that personal finances are in good shape, while consumers expectations are at *decade lows*
"... a complete rout of net favorable views of buying conditions: household durables fell to the lowest level since 1980, vehicles fell to the lowest level since 1974, and homes to the lowest level since 1982 ... all due to complaints about high prices"

data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php?d…
Read 4 tweets

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