Category Archives: Politics

It’s not about flattening the curve. Let’s get rid of it!

17 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Health, Politics, Strategy

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By now you have surely heard about “flattening the curve” and seen the pretty picture that typically comes with it. A variation even made it into the New York Times last week.

covid_curve

The original argument/idea behind this picture crudely goes as follows. The COVID-19 pandemic will be over once a critical fraction (“the point of herd-immunity”, estimations vary but converge typically around two thirds) of the population develops immunity against the virus. Comparing death rates from regions that were surprised and thus overwhelmed by the virus (e.g. the Wuhan region in China or Lombardy in Italy) with those who were well prepared and hence faced a smaller amount of cases per capita (e.g. South Korea or the remainder of China) teaches us that pushing the number of serious cases below the capacity of the local healthcare system saves a ton of lives.

In order to achieve herd-immunity, however, the fraction of the overall population that gets infected with the virus does not change. This is depicted by the fact that the areas below the curves above are approximately equal. While this sounds like an intriguing argument, it is not realistic. Crude calculations show that it could take years to decades until we reach that point.

What we are (or should be) after, is, in fact, a reduction of the area under the curve itself, not stretching the curve over years. Instead of achieving herd-immunity, our goal should be to eradicate the virus as quickly as possible. While we may hope that summer, a vaccination or medications will put an abrupt end to the pandemic, these are hypotheticals that are far from certain to manifest. China with its rigorous policy of social distancing is the prime example after which other countries should model their response to the virus. The Washington Post published a neat little simulation, misleadingly also referring to flattening of the curve , that exemplifies the argument and generates these neat gifs:

covid_sim Not only does the curve get stretched by means of social distancing but the area under the curve, i.e. the number of overall infected people, diminishes. Since I trust that you neither want to see exorbitant numbers of older people and the odd younger ones die, nor that you want to sit at home for the next fifteen years, let’s give it some effort for a change and stop spreading dubious conspiracy theories.

Waiting for a vaccination or effective medications is a dangerous game.  Social distancing does not only save lives, it also allows to get back to our lives significantly faster. If we want to eradicate the curve, however, governments need to take more decisive (and also painful) action than if we wanted to stretch the curve. In particular, it is insufficient to just provide recommendations and it is certainly counter-productive to propagate herd-immunity. No country should witness world-war like scenes in its hospitals due to the indecisiveness of world leaders.

 

The Trump effect and European populism

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Austria, Politics, Voting

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The NY Times connected, if only loosely, surging populist movements in Western Europe to the election of Donald Trump in this article yesterday. While not explicitly stated, I would argue it creates the impression Trumps’s election acts as a catalyst for their cause. In my opinion, Austria’s presidential election from Sunday suggests quite the contrary may be true as well. The idiosyncratic social environment of (in particular Western) European countries and the political positioning of the political parties in questions seem to be factors substantially contributing to whether the outcome of the US presidential election supports or weakens the populist movement’s chances for success.

Critics denounce the Austrian presidential election as irrelevant and of no importance, since the president of Austria is not a “head of government” comparable to the United States or France. On the other hand, however, he is responsible to uphold the balance between the executive, legislative and judicial powers and is enabled to do so by a number of constitutional rights. Once elected, the Austrian president temporarily suspends his party membership to serve as an independent bridge builder. In other words, the Austrian president is definitely more than a figurehead or welcoming clown (the German “Gruss-August” is a frequently seen defamation of the German president who is not equipped with similar constitutional powers).

The recent Austrian presidential election last Sunday was initially supposed to take place at the beginning of  May of this year. And it did. Since none of the candidates achieved the necessary absolute majority on the fist ballot, a run-off two weeks later saw the former university professor and political representative of the Green Alternative party (according to their charter driven by direct democracy, nonviolence, ecology, solidarity, feminism and self-determination),  Alexander Van der Bellen, come out on the top against Norbert Hofer, candidate for the Freedom party of Austria, a national conservative, anti-immigration and Eurosceptic party.

A novelty in Austrian history, the run-off did not feature a candidate from either of the two (former) major parties, the social democratic and the people’s party, who basically led the Austrian government since the country’s inception as a republic (and do so currently). While Hofer won 50% more votes than Van der Bellen on the first ballot, the latter won the run-off by the thinnest of margins (50.35% to 49.65%) as many moderates and traditional voters of the major parties united behind the former university professor to oppose a major right shift in Austrian politics.

The results of this run-off, however, were annulled after the constitutional court of Austria found that Austrian electoral law had been disregarded by counting over 77,900 votes improperly too early, however without any indication of votes having been fraudulently manipulated. The second round re-vote was planned for October, but embarrassingly had to be postponed to December 4th 2016 due to faulty glue on the voting envelopes.

Although neither candidate was a member of either of the two reigning parties, Norbert Hofer was much more perceived as an anti-establishment candidate, in particular after Van der Bellen received endorsements by member of of both major parties. This fact, coupled with infrequent but persistent accusations of fraud had more than a few experts and many Austrians contemplate that Hofer was going to win the re-vote quite comfortably. Polls conducted after the annulling supported this stance. Then, however, things turned out quite differently from what was expected. Alexander Van der Bellen also won the second run-off and, this time around, with a margin as significant as unexpected 53.79% to 46.21%, i.e. by more than 7%.

Donald Trump did not win the US presidential election because he and his supporters mobilized voter types he was not supposed to attract. The forecasts rather got the numbers of people showing up at the urn horribly wrong. The turnout among Trump supporters was significantly underestimated whereas the opposite held true for Clinton supporters. Austrian voters, many of whom closely followed the US election, learned their lesson from the events in the US. Overall voter turnout was about 75%, a very decent outcome when compared to recent trends. In particular, better educated Austrians, the majority of which tends to vote more around and even left from the political middle are more likely to follow international news. The other force which potentially made a difference were anti-establishment protest voters getting cold feet the second time around. Without knowing the exact numbers, this could explain why the absolute number of votes Norbert Hofer received decreased, although overall voter turnout rose by 2%. These voters may haven been discouraged by the uncertainty and the controversial choices for public office in the aftermath of the Trump election.

The above mentioned NYT article lists European populists and does not differentiate between those positioned on the left from those on the right side of the political spectrum. An interesting (untested) hypothesis is that the outcome of the recent US presidential election may, however, influence populist movements in Europe differently, depending on their political position. Trump’s election may well act as a catalyst for anti-establishment movements in general. On the other hand it might induce hesitation of anti-establishment protesters to vote for the right and a higher voter turnout among liberals. As a consequence, Trump’s triumph ironically may well halt or at least slow down some of the nationalist tendencies observed in recent elections across Europe and potentially swing the pendulum towards liberals in particularly hard fought and tight elections.

Lastly, dedicated to my economist friends: To the best of my knowledge, Austria is now the first and only country ever, whose president published an article in Econometrica.

Democracy or not?

11 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in Politics, Voting

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This post is not intended as a critical statement about the ultimate outcome of the presidential election last Tuesday. If one believes in democracy paired with the power of an absolute majority and the equality of all people—independent of gender and ethnicity—being the highest goods a free nation has to strive for, one also has to accept the fact that at times the outcome of an election may collide with one’s worldview.

But that’s also the crux of the matter. Irrespective of this week’s popular vote, the American people are not as equal as the famous passage of the constitution suggests. Putting aside the even less transparent discontinuities implied by the block vote of a state’s electoral college (which encourages parties and their candidates to go after the pivotal voter in a non-exhaustive number states rather than the national one), an elector in Texas is represented by approximately 700,000 voters whereas a member of Wyoming’s college is backed by around 180,000. In an overly simplistic way, that means that a Wyoming vote weighs about four times as much as the vote of a Texan.

Even worse, the electoral college goes back in part to James Madison and his three fifth rule, a rule ensuring the ability of the south to prevail in presidential elections by allocating three fifth of the vote of a “free man” to every slave. Far more scandalous than the fact that votes were not equally important, weighed the fact that this three fifth vote did not even allow slaves to express their free will at lower value but effectively endowed their owner with one massive vote.

Now, slavery has long gone, but inexplicably the inequality of votes remained. The American presidential election, as of now, is based on an imbecilic (and non-transparent to its actors) concept partially based on an even worse ancient rule. While Americans are known to be rather mobile when compared to other nations, the high ratio of people living in the state where they were born suggests that the choice of where to settle is far from a free one for many. Thus, essentially the electoral college system discriminates by birth place.

Many voices currently point at the popular vote with frustration and express the need for change. These comments are however identical to what we heard after the 2000 presidential election. Due to the fact that the electoral college favors parties with more support in rural areas, the incentive to switch to a popular vote is one-sided. Thus, do not expect the popular vote to come in the foreseeable future as it would require a wide consensus. In particular, the so-called swing states are unlikely to collaborate as it would significantly diminish their importance.

While we have undoubtedly seen progress since the three fifth rule, there is so much yet to do to eradicate discrimination from our daily lives. The electoral college system, though, will happily guarantee that many living in the self-proclaimed leading country of the free world are discriminated by birth, independent of how much we achieve on other fronts.

 

Brexit and why it is worse than you might think

24 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by in Politics, Social Dilemma

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It seems quite certain to this hour that the people of the United Kingdom opted to leave the European Union. While the pound has started plummeting and experts have been quite robustly forecasting a drop in GDP exceeding one percent, the common Britain will most likely not face any severe personal consequences from those developments. Most likely, he is even more than willing to trade these minor caveats against some (fictitious) increase in sovereignty, the convenience of continued debate about professional athletes’ weight in stones and the triumph of the pint over half a liter of ale.

The immediate consequences of “Brexit” to the UK economy, no matter how often eloquently repeated by experts and self-proclaimed ones, represent, however, a rather minor part of the big picture. The influx of refugees from the middle East, the resurgence of terrorism in Europe and financial turmoil combine to a prolific breeding ground for nationalism and myopia.

A continent (to a large extent) disproportionately spoiled by peace and prosperity struggles to come to terms with modern reality. Uncertainty and fear augment the words of Gerd Wilders, Heinz-Christian Strache, Viktor Orban, the Le Pen clan and their equals.

Brexit might instill the belief in their minds that their long term goals of sovereignty and social austerity have never been as realizable as in this moment. While the phalanx of conservatives and social democrats in the leading economies of Europe appear to be too powerful (yet), this is far from fact for many smaller European countries and, sadly, historical evidence does not draw a too rosy picture of “a Europe” in lack of cohesion and solidarity.