Favorites January 17th 2022

Jon Walker @JonWalkerDC

We created a sorta proper social safety net for less than a year (enhanced unemployment, extra ACA subsidies) and we got an explosion in new businesses and innovation.

Theodora (Theo) Lau - 劉䂀曼 @psb_dc

America’s entrepreneurial boom continued apace in 2021: New business applications rose by 23% to 5.4m, the most since the government started collecting data in 2004. #Entrepreneurship #Economy https://t.co/AVUiZAhIy3 via @TheEconomist https://t.co/FnPYpOycYx

Evidence once again that just giving just giving people money is an astonishingly beneficial policy.

Bill McBride @calculatedrisk

Six High Frequency Indicators for the Economy calculatedriskblog.com/2022/01/six-hi…

All six were interesting to me, I was surprised how many movie ticket sales there were at the end of 2021. Also, my understanding is that the numbers for BART are similar or worse than the NYC subway situation.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

My strong sense is that fully vaccinated people overestimate the risks of Covid to themselves and that unvaccinated people underestimate the benefits of vaccination, and everything we can do to simply disseminate this information without spin or judgment is helpful.

In service of this goal, hospitalization data by vaccination status for Virginia and Chile. Furthermore:

zeynep tufekci @zeynep

Preprint from Israel finds that people who have breakthrough COVID *after* two-doses of the vaccines, are no more likely to report Long Covid symptoms compared with people who have not been infected at all. So they found that vaccination brings Long Covid risk back to baseline.

Michael Edelstein @epi_michael

We revised the paper and not only are #covid19 cases who got 2 #vaccine doses reporting much less #longcovid symptoms than unvaccinated-they're reporting no more than uninfected people- suggesting vaccination brings these symptoms back to baseline https://t.co/H4DWkzctYZ https://t.co/qvPOpwSXX6 https://t.co/T2Fl7GDTlm

This is absolutely something I was wondering about, this also made the study design clear, asking about specific symptoms.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm sympathetic to the CDC, but making "rapid decisions based on scant evidence" isn't some esoteric function... it's how life works in any crisis! And even if you're only in a crisis 5% of the time, what you do in that 5% is probably more important than the other 95%.

Apoorva Mandavilli @apoorva_nyc

NEW: The coronavirus has forced the CDC to make rapid decisions based on scant evidence. For a bureaucratic agency staffed primarily by meticulous medical professionals, the change has not been easy. https://t.co/rU3TF8PBSb

He continues with an analogy to the National Weather Service, which does hurricane prediction, despite the fact that they're relatively rare events.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

🏆Participation trophies are good, actually: small tokens of achievement can result in big behavior changes over time. Giving participation badges to new editors on Wikipedia increases long-term retention by 20%... even though accounts are pseudonymous & not tied to real names!

I hesitate to admit the amount of work I've put into competition projects to win a t-shirt.

The Alex Nowrasteh @AlexNowrasteh

The collapse of legal immigration and its partial recovery.

Good to see it getting back closer to pre-pandemic levels, but it would always be nice to see it higher!

December 2021

Unfortunately, it looks like we’re probably not getting any rain for the rest of the month.