The Impatience of Youth (and Ideologues?)

 Within an hour I read Frank Bruni's newsleterr (subscribe here) commenting on criticism of scientists re: covid:

What an inevitability. Science doesn’t usually figure everything out all at once; it’s a steadily growing body of knowledge, and its application, especially in the face of new circumstances, can amount to an educated guess, imperfect but invaluable. In the case of Covid, there was no awful screw-up. There was, instead, astonishing speed: These vaccines, powerfully effective, were developed and distributed in record time.

 and a Kevin Drum tweet responding to a Ryan Cooper tweet along the same lines:

Because scientists have the odd notion that they should look for rigorous evidence. The public doesn't give a shit about that. https://t.co/ALAdQfNxwm

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) December 2, 2021

I agree with both--there's a lot of impatience these days. After a long life (hopefully to be much longer) I've grown more tolerant of people (except the people who post erroneous things on the Internet) 

Vietnam Photo--Men of the 69th Signal

Here's Thorn, seen earlier eating a brownie, and Dave Williams, seen earlier with me getting ready for R&R. 

Unfortunately I flipped the slide when I scanned it, as you can tell when trying to read his name.

A group of us in the barracks.

 A picture of me outside the MARS (Military Amateur Radio System, which provided radio calls back to the world) site for which the 69th Signal men were providing electricity.  The line of vision is towards Bien Hoa airbase, site of a Vietcong attack on amunition dumps.  The sandbagged bunker behind me was significant in my memory. 

Vietnam Photo--Men of the 69th

 I believe he's eating from a Care package my mom sent.

Vietnam Photo-R&R

 

Dave Williams and I are going to Tokyo on R&R. I seem to have lost the photos from that.

Missed Opportunities for Indexing

 Over the years our society has indexed a number of things--Social Security is indexed to the consumer prices, ETF's are indexed to various indices, income tax rates are indexed to consumer prices, etc.  Some social programs are means-tested and indexed to income. 

An index has two advantages IMO: it allows for gradual changes and it establishes a linkage between social factors. The gradual change is important: big changes get more recognition than gradual ones.  And psychology tells us that people get upset by the perception of loss, an upset which isn't balanced by their appreciation of gains. "Graduating" has similar effects.

I think we, especially liberals, should take more advantage of indexing.  For example, in 1993 the Clinton administration backed off its energy tax because of opposition from rural Democrats, particularly senators, and saw an increase in the gas tax as a fallback.  But what we should have done is index the gas tax to inflation. The effect would have been roughly to double the value of the tax. 

Another example: Obamacare was passed with a mandate, a financial penalty for not enrolling. What would have happened if we had graduated the penalty, Lessening the initial pain might have enabled the mandate to be preserved, instead of repealed by a Republican Congress. 

Vietnam Photo-Cathedral

 

This was in Saigon; I'm assuming a Catholic cathedral. Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam after the 1954 settlement which ended France's colonial rule, was a Catholic.

We Were Wrong (Third World)

 Noah Smith writes about China's economic progress and its problems here.

His description of the progress China's made reminds me of how wrong/mistaken internationalist liberals were in the 50's and 60's. Back then it seems to me our focus was on the need for foreign aid to help the "Third World" to advance.  I'm thinking of people like Barbara Ward. For all that our hearts were in the right place, I think it's fair to say we never conceived of China's path out of severe poverty. 

Thank goodness we were wrong, because foreign aid, while important and helpful, never reached the levels we thought were necessary. 

USDA Is Last (in Vaccinations)

 That is reported by GovExec here: " The Veterans Affairs Department and Social Security Administration joined USDA in bringing up the bottom of the pack, with all three agencies holding vaccination rates under 88%." 

I suspect the three agencies share a feature--extensive field staffs located in red states.  I know from some posts on the Facebook page for the FSA employee group that whether or not to get the shots caused some angst.  FSA for one is culturally conservative. 

Vietnam Photo--Street Scene

I liked the conjunction of the traffic mostly of bicycles with the Esso station. This would have been in the outskirts of Saigon, IIRC.

Sounds Like Advantage to Females?

 Steve Kelman reports on research in Federal Computer Week--"soft skills" help team performance. To me it reads as if teams will work better if they have at least one stereotypical woman.