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Megan McArdle Profile picture
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16 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
If Sinovac and Sinopharm don't neutralize Omicron--big IF--then China would appear to have an immunologically naive population of over one billion people facing a variant so transmissible it may not be controllable even with lockdowns. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
The good news is that in early innings Omicron appears to be less deadly, and its main competitive advantage appears to be immune escape, which doesn't help you in an immunologically naive population.
The bad news is that we don't know how high R is, and a sufficiently fast-spreading virus can overwhelm your hospitals even if IFR is lower.
Also, they are about to host the olympics. Happy Thursday!

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More from @asymmetricinfo

Megan McArdle Profile picture
12 Dec
This is a problem that has deep roots. Consider the history of the subway system.
In 1891, New York State passes a bill to allow the thing to be built. As the price of getting it passed, Albany Republicans, fearful that Tammany will get their greedy, corrupt little fingers on the funding, sets up a rapid transit commission stuffed with good government types
The commission is very, very concerned that everything will only be done in the Best Possible Way, and as a result, they chase their own tails for the better part of a decade, in part because the streetcar companies use procedural tricks to jam them up.
Read 18 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
9 Dec
Yes, it is both true that most of the women who have abortions are low income, and that educated women are much more supportive of permissive abortion law than women without a college diploma.
How do we explain this? Well, for starters, the majority of women at any income level haven't had an abortion, and variation in opinion among those who haven't may explain the difference.
Or maybe those who have regretted it. Or maybe they think the law should be different. I don't know, and can only get so far by consulting my own imagination.
Read 10 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
3 Dec
I see claims like this a lot, but Sweden has basically the same abortion rate as the United States, and within the US, our deepest blue states make up half of the top 10, and all of the top 3, for per capita abortions.

worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankin…

kff.org/womens-health-…
I don't say that being deep blue causes a high abortion rate, but the evidence that sex ed or free contraception makes abortion unnecessary is surprisingly weak. Cultural and institutional factors seem to matter more than sex ed programs per se.
I suspect there are threshold effects: if people are truly ignorant, or contraception completely unavailable, changing policy makes a huge difference. But once they know where babies come from and where to buy condoms, other effects dominate sex ed or contraception subsidies.
Read 4 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
3 Dec
So far, the response from readers to this column has been "This is ridiculous, every single woman I know will be up in arms!"

First of all, that's probably not true--and second of all, it's a big country, & your circle of young, educated professionals aren't the majority.
This is a symptom of a broader problem with how American elites approach diversity. We emphasize certain kinds of demographic diversity a lot--which, yay!--but forget that highly educated professionals are unrepresentative of basically any demographic group they belong to.
Their interests, tastes, needs, and outlook all diverge significantly from the average member of their demographic group. And like all of us, they often tend to be blind to the fact that the things that matter most to them are not necessarily what others most care about.
Read 8 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
1 Dec
Looking at abortion opinion, it's actually quite striking how little men and women differ on this question. The whole pro-life is about men telling women what to do with their bodies" schtick simply isn't grounded in reality. news.gallup.com/poll/245618/ab…
Women are somewhat more likely to say abortion should be legal under all circumstances, but that's a minority view among women as well as men. The percentage of men and who say it should be illegal in all circumstances is fluctuates right around 20%, male or female
Men are more likely to self-id as pro-life, and women as pro-choice, but when you drill down into specifics, it's clear this stems from differences in labeling quite similar views.

norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Rep…
Read 14 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
30 Nov
I just filed a column on how Twitter is a bottomless cesspool of negativity, so let me offer something positive and helpful: the endless braise.
If you're like me, you have a few basic braise recipes in constant circulation all winter. In my case: A tomatillo-based pork braise. A raisin-wine-worcester-and-celery oxtail braise loosely based on a reconstruction of an ancient roman dish. A tomato-wine-and-soy pot roast. Etc.
We always have liquid left over at the end. So instead of throwing it away, or just thickening and serving with pasta or tortillas, I freeze it, and use it to start the next batch.
Read 9 tweets

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