Favorites August 15 2021

Aug 16, 2021

One of our leads published an op-ed in @SJSpotlight in support #SB9.

sanjosespotlight.comGurin: In support of SB 9 - San José SpotlightHousing policy is back on the political agenda this year. After two years of inaction, the state Legislature has taken up a slew of housing bills. Among the best known is Senate Bill 9. This important, though limited and incremental bill has unfortunately been subjected to a coordinated smear campai…

I'm very excited about this bill!

Eric Topol @EricTopol

Data are accruing to support the impact of boosters for reducing Delta breakthrough infections Here by age ≥ 60 And below by restoring vaccine effectiveness to high levels (all age groups are now > 6 months out, except teens who are newly vaccinated) https://t.co/BkFzNUjaUV

Eran Segal @segal_eran

Israel started administering a third dose to 60 y/o and above on July 30 By now, over half of this age group received the 3rd dose In the two weeks that passed, the relative fraction of cases of 60 y/o and above who are vaccinated out of all cases dropped from ~12-14% to ~6% https://t.co/wOQCRPr5BD

Looks like further doses still can have a big positive effect.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

This was the map *before* the early-Trump escalation, and the Taliban *continued to gain ground* during the escalation years. Since Trump started moving to withdrawal they've been pretending withdrawall is the reason for Taliban advances.

I had not really seen a map of Afghanistan laid out in terms of control like this before. Yglesias puts the blame squarely on military establishment for wanting to continue an obviously failed strategy.

Jeffrey P. Clemens @jeffreypclemens

The US effort to suppress opium production in Afghanistan is an issue in which I’ve long taken an interest. It was the topic of my undergraduate thesis, which was later published in the Journal of Law and Economics. It also generated a follow-on project. 2/19

Really interesting analysis of the situation, poppy production is a miniscule part of the cost of heroin, so demand is inelastic. US attempts to curb production directly increased the Taliban's profit from the cultivation.

Jeffrey P. Clemens @jeffreypclemens

As documented in a recent report by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghan poppy cultivation has if anything drifted gradually upward since the US first ramped up its expenditures on the effort to suppress opium production (roughly in 2005): unodc.org/documents/crop… 9/19

This whole lesson generalizes, prohibitions you can't actually enforce will just make outlaws rich and powerful.

Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 @hamandcheese

"If we leave our soldiers will have died in vain" is a stupid argument with no limiting principle, in addition to being fundamentally manipulative.

Overcoming the sunk cost fallacy is the success here by Biden, but such a situation will always feel like a failure.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Why the hell would we not take these people in

Hugo Lowell @hugolowell

New: US officials are considering the feasibility of evacuating Afghans who provided assistance to US forces but lack a visa to holding locations while their applications are being assessed, per source.

And thus we move on to the next problem, what can we do to soften the pain of a horrible situation that we created over the last two decades. We must act fast, details can be sorted out later. Learn from mistakes. The situation on the ground is absolutely terrifying.