2:00PM Water Cooler 1/25/2023 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Hermit Thrush, Brown Tract Ponds, Hamilton, New York, United States. “Other Behaviors: Advertise. Habitat: Forest, Deciduous Forest, Pond.”

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Biden Administration

Tossing a few coins to the peasants while riding by in one’s coach:

Right now, there’s a senior deciding which bill they have to postpone because their insulin is $400 per month.

No more.

The Inflation Reduction Act caps insulin at $35 for seniors on Medicare – and I’m fighting like hell to get it done for every American.

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 24, 2023

This is where Democrats are, instead of #MedicareForAll. Kudos, however, for changing the shopworn “fighting for” to “fighting like hell for.” Refreshing!

2024

“Could Trump Run to DeSantis’s Left in 2024?” [Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine]. “Trump famously abandoned austerity politics upon taking office in 2017, presiding over an orgy of tax-cutting and uninhibited spending. And while his failed assault on Obamacare included serial efforts to gut the Medicaid program that provides health care for low-income Americans, he distanced himself from the traditional GOP hunger to mess with Social Security and Medicare, safety-net programs that middle-class voters — and perhaps especially Republican retirees and near retirees — regarded as benefits they had earned. Discarding the green eyeshade of austerity was one of several voter-pleasing steps Trump took to detoxify conservative politics. Others were abandoning free-trade shibboleths that the GOP’s white working-class base intensely disliked and downplaying a reflexive defense-hawk tendency that predictably led to unpopular ‘forever wars.’” • The bastard keeps asking for my vote. Why can’t Democrats do that? And I love the concept of Trump moving toward “the sensible center.” I’ll especially love it if Biden and McCarthy start ginning up a “Grand Bargain.”

“Trump Is Plotting How to Kick DeSantis ‘In the Nuts.’ Here’s His Playbook, So Far” [Rolling Stone]. Personally, I think that’s giving short-bodied vulgarian DeSantis too much credit. Anyhow: “‘In a Republican primary, only Donald Trump could effectively go after Ron DeSantis for wanting to cut Social Security,’ a Republican close to the 2024 Trump campaign tells Rolling Stone. ‘Trump has a track record of saying the right things on this issue both when it comes to a general election and also Republican voters in a primary. DeSantis’ record in the House [on this topic] is very much of the Paul Ryan, privatize Social Security platform, which is just not where our voters are now.’… At the time before the rise of Trumpism in 2015 and 2016, those principles were all about constraining government spending by repealing Obamacare and pursuing ‘entitlement reform.’ In 2013, during DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that sought to balance the federal budget in just four years — twice as fast as a competing measure by Ryan that got the Republican budget wonk lampooned as a ‘zombie-eyed granny starver.’*” • Harsh, but fair. NOTE * Invented by Charlie Pierce in 2012, good one; I had thought Pierce lost his mind by that point, but I guess not!

“Frozen: Trump’s primary challengers balk at jumping into the unknown” [Politico]. “Those preparing to challenge Donald Trump in the GOP’s presidential primary are taking their time, privately discussing the prospect of waiting until spring or summer to get in, according to three Republican strategists familiar with different candidates’ deliberations. Part of it is strategic: an effort to make someone else an early Trump foil. Part of it is fear: wariness around their own ability to raise money to sustain a drawn-out campaign. ‘It’s very, very quiet,’ said Wayne MacDonald, a New Hampshire lawmaker and former Republican Party chair in the first-in-the-nation primary state. It appears increasingly likely to stay that way for far longer than once expected. On Tuesday, one likely candidate, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told CBS News it may take a ‘handful of months’ for him to decide whether to run. An adviser to one potential presidential candidate has discussed with members of at least two other potential candidates’ teams the advantage of multiple candidates announcing around the same time [hold hands and jump], according to one Republican strategist briefed on those talks. The conversations, which took place earlier this month, were informal. But they suggest a common recognition among Republicans of what the strategist called ‘strength in numbers’ in a primary involving Trump.” Because that worked so well in 2016? More: “The proximate cause of the frozen primary is Trump, the former president and only declared candidate in the race.”

“Classified documents at Pence’s home, too, his lawyer says” [Associated Press]. • At what point do we get to say “They all do it?”

Republican Funhouse

“Santos skips White House event for new members” [The Hill]. “The reception in the East Room of the White House was scheduled to begin at 5:20 p.m., and Santos was not listed on the White House’s list of expected attendees. Santos, like all new members, was invited, as is tradition every two years. Santos has faced a controversial start to his time in Congress, coming under fire for lying about his personal and work history and facing questions about his campaign finances. He has rebuked calls to resign from a growing number of members of Congress. Four other first-term Republican House members skipped the event, while 10 were listed as attendees, including Santos’s fellow New York Republican Reps. Nick Langworthy and Mike Lawler.” • One doesn’t “rebuke” a “call.”

Democrats en Déshabillé

Patient readers, it seems that people are actually reading the back-dated post! But I have not updated it, and there are many updates. So I will have to do that. –lambert

I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:

The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as “unreformable” as the PMC is unreformable; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, that’s because the PMC lacks the capability to govern. (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.

Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant Will Not Seek Reelection” [The Stranger]. “Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant, the council’s lone socialist and most senior member, announced Thursday that she will not seek reelection this year. Instead, she and her fighting movement will ditch electoralism and launch ‘Workers Strike Back,’ a national campaign that aims to win better lives and conditions for workers, gains that Sawant claims [correctly] so-called progressive elected leaders fail to deliver. But Sawant did more than own the libs: She helped win a $15 minimum wage for Seattle workers, she pushed the council to tax Amazon, and she championed renter protection after renter protection in her role as the Chair of the Renters’ and Sustainability Committee. Despite her Thursday announcement, Sawant warned her many adversaries not to ‘mix their martinis just yet.’ She’ll fight up to the buzzer for a rent control trigger law, a cap on late fees for overdue rents, and ending the use of credit checks in rental applications.” Sawant can turn a phrase too! More: “Socialist Alternative will not run another candidate to fill her seat, Sawant told reporters. The party believes the time and money it takes to run a candidate would be better spent organizing their new movement.” • Could Sawant possibly be the real deal? Do we have readers in Seattle?

“Kshama Sawant will not seek reelection to Seattle City Council” [Seattle Times]. “At a press conference held at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, Sawant said she’s won election after election ‘not on the basis of go-along-to-get-along politics, not on the basis of wine and cheese with the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the establishment, but by fighting back and becoming a thorn in the side of the Seattle ruling class.’…. “There is no universe where you can do what we have done, which is win historic victories and stand up for the working class, and not get in crosshairs of the ruling class,” Sawant said in an interview late Thursday. ‘They wouldn’t be mad if I was not effective,’ she added. In fact, Sawant calls criticism from others in politics and business “a badge of honor,” and only worries that the policy conversations she has driven will fade when she leaves. ‘On the one hand I fully expect big business, the chamber and establishment Democrats to feel emboldened to bring City Hall back to corporate business as usual, like they had before me,’ said Sawant, who first made her decision known in an editorial in The Stranger. ‘On the other hand, nothing is automatic.’” • No indeed!

“The Only People Panicking Are the People in Charge” [Foreign Policy]. From 2020, still germane: “Lee Clarke and Caron Chess, two researchers at Rutgers University who are usually credited with coining the phrase ‘elite panic’ argue with persuasive examples that elites fear panic, cause panic, and often panic themselves, reacting disproportionately to threats. (Clarke has created a set of presentation slides about social behavior in disasters; the final slide, titled ‘Modeling official behavior,’ gives us the evocative bullet points: ‘Ignorance,’ ‘Arrogance,’ ‘Hubris,’ and ‘Officials can cause ‘panic.”) Kathleen Tierney of the University of Colorado looked at elite panic in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, such as when then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco first called off the emergency response and then threatened shoot-to-kill orders in response to the problem of looting, which as later reporting showed was highly exaggerated. Similarly, police from a neighboring parish blocked evacuees from New Orleans from entering, firing shotguns over their heads, because of their fears of the ‘criminal element’ based on those same exaggerated reports of looting and mayhem. The impacts of this, as Tierney notes, include the direct damage to people who were frightened or unable to scavenge for food. Tierney asks: ‘How much resident-to-resident helping behavior was prevented or suppressed because people were afraid to venture out to help their neighbors out of fear of being killed or arrested?’ Clarke and Chess write: ‘Planners and policy makers sometimes act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than the threatening conditions themselves.’ That false claim becomes a way for elites to maintain control and protect their own interests. Typically shielded from the immediate impacts of a disaster, elites tend to be much more worried about disruption to the status quo and the loss of political capital and power. That they use a long-discredited fallacy about the public behaving irrationally to do this adds insult to injury. It’s also a dereliction of duty, because while lies and exaggerations about the potential for panic worsen a crisis response, working with the public to deal with the disaster tends to improve it.” • Since the elites are also experts in fomenting panics….

“Protest isn’t terrorism” [Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years]. “[A]cross America, laws are being rewritten, often at the behest of corporate lobbyists, to make dissent and protest much more difficult. Here’s a webinar from, among others, the veteran activist Marla Marcum detailing the spread of these anti-protest laws across the coungtry; she reports that only five states haven’t had such laws introduce…. As Marcum put it, ‘most people who hear about protesters charged with domestic terrorism will process that information as ‘there are people committing terrorist acts’ and they will think ‘terrorism is bad,’ and they won’t question whether the label tells any kind of truth. Because terrorism IS bad. Full stop. But we need to know what the words mean in each context where a prosecutor or politician deploys them.’ And in the case of these new laws, it just means: we don’t like you.” • “We don’t like you.”

It may be that I have to do some rethinking about partisanship:

The political markers and positions with which people self-identify become meaningless if the most politically meaningful act is the act of self-identification.

— C.M. Lewis (@thehousered) January 25, 2023

Readers, what do you think? Is this your own experience? How about those around you?

#COVID19

Lambert here: I am but a humble tapewatcher, but unlike Eric Topol, I’m not calling a surge, because the last peak was Biden’s Omicron debacle, and after an Everest like that, what’s left? Topol’s view is the establishment view: Hospital-centric. Mine is infection-centric. I do not see the universal acceleration or doubling in cases that I would expect to see based on past surges.

I am calling a “Something Awful.” It’s gonna be bad, in some new way, and we don’t know how, yet (but see here for immune system dysregulation, which is looking pretty awful).

Stay safe out there!

• “Seriously, why should we care about anything Twitter trolls have to say?” [Toronto Star]. “Coincidentally, a friend sent me a revealing Twitter exchange last week between two public health experts. These two physicians became minor celebrities at the height of COVID-19 — until their paths diverged. I’ve never spoken to Dr. Isaac Bogoch, but whenever I’ve listened to the advice he’s offered on television (or Twitter) he came across as thoughtful and measured, never contemptuous or fear-mongering. I don’t know Dr. David Fisman, but whenever I heard his unmodulated musings, I wondered why anyone would heed him. The other day, Fisman (who resigned in protest from Ontario’s science advisory table in 2021) launched a personal attack on Bogoch (who served on the COVID-19 vaccine distribution task force). Fisman berated him for the supposed sin of contextualizing, rather than criticizing, the reluctance of B.C.’s provincial health officer to impose a mask mandate anew: ‘Not sure why you’re running interference for Bonnie Henry on masking, @BogochIsaac,’ Fisman tweeted at him. ‘You’re a smart guy. You understand reproduction numbers. This is an absolutely terrible framing …’ You can read their tangled Twitter exchange for yourself. But what stands out is not so much Fisman’s puerile argumentation as Bogoch’s more restrained remonstration — not on matters relating to the scientific method, but social media madness: ‘I’ve been reflecting on this thread for a bit,’ Bogoch began. ‘I have zero intention to be unkind to David here, rather it is an opportunity to touch base on the current state of social media/public discourse & our current trajectory (extending well beyond COVID). Summary: Vey iz mir.’ (Translation, for those unfamiliar with the Yiddish language: ‘Woe is me.’ Or, translated into body language, it looks like an eye roll.)” • Well. Resigning from Ontario’s Science advisory table looks like a badge of honor to me (“I do not wish to remain in this uncomfortable position, where I must choose between placid relations with colleagues on the one hand, and the necessity of speaking truth during a public health crisis on the other,” Fisman wrote. We need more of this, not less.) And did you notice that, in the midst of his tone policing, the author asserts that Fisman’s “argumentation” is “puerile” without actually showing it? Earns a follow, as we say.

• One idea for a protest:

• “Structural Characteristics That Can Help Insulate HHS Agencies against Potential Political Interference” (PDF) [GAO]. “Multiple senior agency officials highlighted how the government-wide coordination required in response to an emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic can create more opportunity for potential political interference. Experts and former agency heads have identified structural reforms that may improve insulation of selected HHS agencies against political interference in future public health emergencies. These structural reform ideas include converting FDA into an independent agency; making the CDC director a Senate-confirmed position; and reducing the number of political appointees at the selected agencies.” • The study was done across both the Trump and Biden administrations. I’m really just laying down a marker here; but you can bet that however the Biden Adminsitration decided to adopt a pandemic policy of mass infection without mitigation, imposed it on CDC and HHS, as well as the propaganda organs we used to call “the press,” will not be classified as “political interference.”

Case Data

NOT UPDATED BioBot wastewater data from January 23:

Lambert here: For now, I’m going to use this wastewater data as the best proxy for case data (ignoring the clinical case data portion of this chart, which in my view “goes bad” after March 2022, for reasons as yet unexplained). At least we can spot trends, and compare current levels to equivalent past levels.

Transmission

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission (the “red map,” which is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.) The map is said to update Monday-Friday by 8 pm:

The previous map:

NOTE: I shall most certainly not be using the CDC’s new “Community Level” metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you don’t want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. That the “green map” (which Topol calls a “capitulation” and a “deception”) is still up and being taken seriously verges on the criminal.

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published January 25:

-1.5.%.

Wastewater

NOT UPDATED Wastewater data (CDC), January 21:

Easing off, though you do have to wonder what’s the point of a national system where half the country has gone dark.

January 17:

And MWRA data, January 23:

Lambert here: Still uptick in the north. However, only some the students are back; BU classes begin January 19; Harvard’s January 22.

Variants

Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk]. UPDATE Yes. See NC here on Pango. Every Friday, a stately, academic pace utterly incompatible with protecting yourself against a variant exhibiting doubling behavior.

NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (Walgreens), January 9:

Lambert here: BQ.1* and XBB still dominate. However, CH.1.91 appears for the first time at 1.9%. That’s a little unsettling, because a Tweet in Links, January 11 from GM drew attention to it (“displays such a high relative growth advantage”) and in Water Cooler, January 18, from Nature: “CH.1.1 and CA.3.1 variants were highly resistant to both monovalent and bivalent mRNA vaccinations.” Now here is CH.1.1 in the Walgreens variant data. Let’s see what CDC does with it tomorrow. The Covid variant train always leaves on time, and there’s always another train coming!

Lambert here: Wierdly, the screen shot about has been replaced today by data from “10/7/2022.” (It’s clearly not current data; BQ.1* and XBB do not dominate.

NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (CDC), December 31 (Nowcast off):

BQ.1* takes first place. XBB coming up fast. CH.1, unlike the Walgreens chart, does not appear. (For BQ.1/XBB and vaccine escape, see here.) Here is Region 2, the Northeast, where both BQ.1* and XBB are said to be higher, and are:

Makes clear that Region 2 (New England) varies greatly from the national average. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we ended up with different variants dominating different parts of the country.

• As a check, since New York is a BQ.1* hotbed, New York hospitalization, updated January 24:

• Hospitalization data for Queens, updated January 22:

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,129,618 – 1,129,145 = 473 (472 * 365 = 172,280 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).

Lambert here: Deaths lag, and now we have some confirmation that whatever we just went through is decreasing.

It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.

Stats Watch

There are no official statistics of interest today.

Inflation: “Biden finally gets a win against inflation” [Politico]. “Americans’ average income has beaten inflation for the past six months, driven by the plummeting cost of gas, along with drops in furniture, cars and other goods. If the trend continues, it could be a boost for President Joe Biden as he gears up for a tough reelection campaign, undercutting one of the main Republican arguments against his handling of the economy. ‘People really know how far their paycheck goes,’ Jared Bernstein, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. ‘When gas prices are down $1.70 relative to where they were last summer, that’s the kind of breathing room that people recognize.’ Yet that progress could be in jeopardy: As Federal Reserve officials prepare to meet next week to raise interest rates again, their inflation-fighting crusade — which Fed Chair Jerome Powell has vowed to continue — has sparked fears of a recession, meaning that workers could be forced to give up those hard-fought gains.” • Or not forced, or so much, if they had unions.

Tech: “We tried to run a social media site and it was awful” [Financial Times]. “A few months ago, FT Alphaville thought it might be fun to host a Mastodon server. Boy, were we wrong!” There’s a bullet list of horribles, but this one stands out: “a=Cloud services work on the Hotel California principle: it’s easy to get started but as soon as you’re in, you’re stuck. After just a month our barely visible Fediverse presence was taking up 160 gigabytes and each mandatory server upgrade had an exponential effect on the cost, measured either by cash or carbon. Nuking really does seem the only way out.” • Worth a read. Also, go long Twitter?

Tech: “Microsoft announces new multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI” [CNBC]. “Microsoft on Monday announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Microsoft declined to provide a specific dollar amount, but Semafor reported earlier this month that Microsoft was in talks to invest as much as $10 billion. The deal marks the third phase of the partnership between the two companies, following Microsoft’s previous investments in 2019 and 2021. Microsoft said the renewed partnership will accelerate breakthroughs in AI and help both companies commercialize advanced technologies in the future. ‘We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,’ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a blog post. OpenAI works closely with Microsoft’s cloud service Azure.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 62 Greed (previous close: 62 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 56 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 25 at 12:27 PM EST.

The 420

“Weed Legalization Supported By Most U.S. Voters: This Week in Cannabis Investing” [Kiplinger]. “Support among Americans for federal weed legalization continues to grow. According to a survey conducted by polling firm Data for Progress [ugh], most voters – be they Republican, Democrat or Independent – support legalizing recreational marijuana at the federal level. The survey found that 65% of Americans are in favor of the legalization of cannabis. And across the political spectrum, ending cannabis prohibition was supported by 75% of Democrats, 67% of Independents, and 52% of Republicans.” And: “We have been following polling data on cannabis legalization before we launched Poseidon [the author’s investment firm], and the movement has shown constant growth in support. While Democrats initially led legislation around weed legalization, we are seeing more Republican states take efforts that support cannabis – like those being made toward recreational weed legalization in Florida. These legal medical and adult-use recreational programs will lead to a decline in stigma around the plant. It’s great that, for the first time, we are seeing a majority of Republicans now supporting cannabis legalization at the federal level.”

Groves of Academe

Lots of land grant universities:

The Gallery

“Is Classic Art in Danger at Neglected Fresno Building?” [GV Wire]. Fresno Week at Naked Capitalism continues: “Passing by the Fagbule Glass House, it is easy to note the destroyed building and overlook the fabulous piece of art. It looks like a bomb went off at the location at 1930 E. Shields Avenue, across the street from Manchester Center. The only glass at the Fagbule Glass House is either broken panes, in shards around the building, or piled in the parking lot. Fires have burned several areas around the building. Trash is everywhere. A terra cotta relief, “A Day in the Park” by Clement Renzi sits on the side of the vacant building. It is incredible that the 288 tiles that comprise the art installation remain undisturbed, surrounded by such a disaster. As of Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., the artwork remains intact. Art lovers are worried that luck may not last. The questions are — how did the building get to be that way, and what happens to the art?… In recent years, before total dilapidation, the Covenant of Faith Family Church — pastored by Fagbule and his wife Kemi Fagbule — used the building… Insurance claims, Fagbule said, are “dragging.” He estimates it will take $500,000 to repair the building — money he does not have.” • The art:

Interestingly, the “Fagbule Glass House” started as a savings and loan, back in 1982.

Zeitgeist Watch

I considered filing this under “Groves of Academe,” but I do think it’s more of a zeitgiest thing. The account is at the University of Arkansas, interestingly. The whole thread is worth a read:

If “dogmatic doxastic voluntarism” (DDV) is a thing, that would seem to account for a lot. “It’s just a cough.” “Tanks will turn the tide for Ukraine. DDV reminds me of a phenomenon I’ve discussed with Yves that I call “spreadsheet thinking”; it’s the concept — ideology? — that if you alter a spreadsheet cell — as for example by changing the cell for Leopard tanks in Germany to a sum of cells for Leopard tanks in Germany, Poland, Spain, etc. — that you necessarily change the material world (or change it in they way you expect). Perhaps spreadsheet thinking comes from the world of finance; I don’t know. DDV must also be akin to what a billionaire feels: They can literally buy anything that can be bought, and so for them, believing is indeed action; they have people for the action part. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,” sayeth The Bearded One. Or in the vulgate: The fish rots from the head.

Class Warfare

“Worker Earnings, Service Quality, and Firm Profitability: Evidence from Nursing Homes and Minimum Wage Reforms” [Review of Economics and Statistics]. From 2022, still germane: “This paper finds that higher wages for workers translates to better service quality, measured by improved safety, better health, and reduced mortality for nursing home residents. These benefits are both statistically significant and economically meaningful. Applying the average pressure sore treatment costs from the previous literature (Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, 2016; Brem et al., 2010) to the point estimates in Table 6 and the estimated increase in nursing assistant pay suggests that cost savings from pressure sore treatment alone offset between 20-50% of the increase in staff costs. This simple back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that wage increases in the nursing home sector fully pay for themselves if the value of increased longevity for nursing home residents is at least $23,000.” • Great, but “value” to whom?

News of the Wired

“How antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics” [Nature]. By studying bacteria grown in the laboratory, a team has now tracked how antidepressants can trigger drug resistance. ‘Even after a few days exposure, bacteria develop drug resistance, not only against one but multiple antibiotics,’ says senior author Jianhua Guo, who works at the Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. This is both interesting and scary, he says. Globally, antibiotic resistance is a significant public-health threat. An estimated 1.2 million people died as a direct result of it in 20192, and that number is predicted to climb.” • Oops. “Interesting and scary,” that’s NC!

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