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Direktur Jenderal WHO dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus mengatakan faksinya berasa sedih berakhir dengar informasi Presiden Donald Trump mengenai pemberhentian permodalan terhadap organisasi kesehatan dunia itu. Ini dia berikan dalam suatu pertemuan wartawan virtual pada Rabu waktu ditempat (15/4). “Amerika Serikat udah berubah menjadi kawan lama serta dermawan buat WHO serta kami ingin tetap akan demikian, ” kata Tedros, seperti dilansir AFP. “Kami menyesalkan ketetapan Presiden...

from Michael Hudson Even before the novel coronavirus appeared, many American families were falling behind on student loans, auto loans, credit cards and other payments. America’s debt overhead was pricing its labor and industry out of world markets. A debt crisis was inevitable eventually, but covid-19 has made it immediate. Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives and huge bailouts to corporations, raises the threat of a depression. But it doesn’t have...

from Lars Syll What we discover is that the cash value of these laws lies beneath the surface — in the extent to which they approximate the behaviour of real gases or substances, since such substances do not exist in the world … Notice that we are here regarding it as grounds for complaint that such claims are ‘reduced to the status of definitions’ … Their truth is obtained at a price, namely that they cease to tell us about this particular world and start telling us about the meaning of...

I want to try to punch above my weight (and be a troll) and contest this Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital … said it will take weeks or months to get results and doctors and patients will need to wait for the results of the clinical trials before knowing which Covid-19 patients — if any — should be getting remdesivir. “I think we should be extremely cautious about responding too...

A bit of a post-mortem on my last post.  Andrew Gelman discusses the Santa Clara county study here.  He focuses on sample imbalances, selection bias, and especially the way the authors deal with the specificity of the test.  See his post for the gory details, but he is quite critical of the study, to the point of asking for an apology from the authors for wasting our time: I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time...

What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic indicators and the polls” The model takes two steps. First, average the head-to-head heats by the two major...

from Lars Syll [embedded content] O day, arise! The atoms are dancing. Thanks to Him the universe is dancing. The souls are dancing, overcome with ecstasy. I’ll whisper in your ear where their dance is taking them. All the atoms in the air and in the desert know well, they seem insane. Every single atom, happy or miserable, Becomes enamoured of the sun, of which nothing can be said. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273)

from David Ruccio Modern Monetary Theorists are having a moment, as governments (many of them run by conservative regimes, such as Donald Trump and the Republicans in the United States) are running gigantic fiscal deficits in order to combat the economic crisis occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic.* This time, with the $2 trillion CARES Act, the U.S. federal government has taken an additional step down the road of Modern Monetary Theory, by having the Federal Reserve buy an unlimited...

I want to think about how two pieces of news should change my thinking about COVID-19.  (Warning:  I have no expertise in medicine or public health, and you have no reason to take my thoughts seriously – but you knew that already.) A new serological study in Santa Clara county (discussed by Kevin Drum here) suggests that far more people have been infected with COVID-19 than researchers had previously believed.  This is only one study and full of...