Social media is designed to keep us scrolling even when we know we’d be better off putting the phone down. Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton and her co-authors argue that smarter and more robust antitrust enforcement can help, by making room for new social media platforms that promote themselves as healthier alternatives.
Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University
Written by Susie Allen
If you’ve ever delayed sleep to doomscroll on Twitter or checked Instagram just one more time to see if someone else liked that selfie, you know that social media can be a time suck. But is it addictive?
A growing body of medical evidence suggests it is, economist Fiona Scott Morton of Yale SOM writes in a new paper, co-authored with James Niel Rosenquist of Harvard Medical School and Samuel N. Weinstein of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. That has important implications for how regulators should oversee social media platforms. And it also has surprising implications for antitrust enforcement.
Scott Morton, Rosenquist, and Weinstein argue that antitrust enforcement has long relied on assumptions about how to measure consumer welfare that simply don’t work when a company is making a habit-forming product. Indeed, Scott Morton points out, the entire field of behavioral economics has arisen to give us more sophisticated ways to understand “irrational” decision making, including evaluating the impact on our welfare of goods and services that come with self-control issues, from gym memberships and energy-inefficient air conditioners to opioids.
The addictive qualities of social media are compounded by a lack of competition in the industry. When air conditioners compete, the more efficient ones can gain an advantage by advertising their low running costs. But without meaningful social media competition or regulation, companies have little incentive to change the addictive quality of their content.
“We don’t want to ban cars because they are dangerous, nor would that be a good solution for social media,” Scott Morton emphasizes. “Instead we limit the danger of cars with tools like speed limits, traffic lights, drivers’ licenses, and seatbelts—and we have lots of competition and choice. In digital media we need to find a way to control the stuff that’s harming us, and our children in particular, while keeping the healthy part.” She believes smarter antitrust enforcement could help, making room for newer and safer social media platforms in the market as well as more competition.
For decades, the medical community was hesitant to accept that addiction was possible without the ingestion of a physical substance. But, as Scott Morton and her co-authors write, growing understanding of so-called behavioral addiction has chipped away at that resistance. In fact, gambling addiction is now recognized in the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Social media and gambling can hijack the brain’s reward system in similar ways, the researchers argue. In the case of gambling, you’ll keep pulling the slot-machine lever even after you’ve lost hundreds of dollars, just in case the next one is a winner; in the case of social media, you’ll get lost in the infinite scroll, no matter what else you should be doing.
It’s no coincidence that many of us find social media so hard to resist. The business model platforms have adopted depends on people giving up their time: the longer a user is swiping away, the more revenue-generating ads they’ll see. Features such as likes, comments, autoplay, and algorithmic promotion of emotionally arousing content are designed to keep users coming back again and again.
Scott Morton has seen it all firsthand. “Twitter will show me some posts, I’ll look at them, and then two minutes later, they’ll meter out some more…You can watch them try to drip it out so that I stay on the platform longer,” she says.
In theory, of course, there’s nothing wrong with spending a lot of time on social media. Companies have argued that the hours we log represent positive engagement with the platform: we like what we’re seeing, and so we stay.
But in practice, Scott Morton and her co-authors note, survey data finds that a large number of heavy social media users wish they used social media less because of its negative effects on their lives—a classic tug-of-war between short-term impulses and long-term goals that is a hallmark of compulsive behavior. Early data also links social media use among adolescents to mood disorders and ADHD. The dangers seem particularly acute for girls.
So, what does this all mean for regulators trying to decide whether social media platforms are engaging in anti-competitive conduct? Baked into antitrust enforcement is the idea of increasing consumer welfare: enforcement ought to make life better for consumers by promoting competition so that goods become cheaper, better, or both.
And economists have long argued that one especially useful way to look at consumer welfare is through what’s called output—the quantity of goods or services produced in a given market. “Historically, we have thought of pro-competitive things as being those that increase output and non-competitive things as those that decrease output,” Scott Morton explains.
If the merger of two ice cream companies results in an overall larger ice cream market, then (the basic argument goes) consumers must have benefited, either because ice cream was cheaper and they bought more, or because it was better and they bought more. If the merger reduces the size of the ice cream market, it must have been anticompetitive.
But the logic of output maximization falls apart when it comes to any addictive product. For someone addicted to, say, OxyContin, giving them more OxyContin represents an increase in output—but it surely doesn’t represent a simple increase in consumer welfare.
“This shortcut, which is, ‘Let’s use an output measure like number of pills to proxy for consumer surplus,’—it isn’t a valid shortcut anymore, not when you’ve got an addictive product,” Scott Morton says. “Giving people a larger quantity of something they’re addicted to is likely not increasing social welfare.”
So, rather than looking at output, regulators need to take a more expansive view of consumer welfare, Scott Morton and her co-authors argue—a view that incorporates the specific nature of the product in question. In the case of social media, an antitrust case might rely on whether a company’s business model offers incentives for addiction or has other negative effects on users’ behavior.
By looking at social media companies from this perspective, regulators can promote competition and innovation. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the answer to the problem of social media is more social media, but there’s good reason to believe it. Basic consumer protection regulations would also help by creating a level playing field.
With more companies vying for users, Scott Morton explains, they’ll have a greater incentive to differentiate in ways users value. In all kinds of markets—cars, movies, food—companies have thrived by promoting themselves as the safe option. A non-addictive social media platform could have similar consumer appeal.
“More social media sites means I can choose the site that offers me fewer ads, less addiction, more of the content that interests me,” Scott Morton says.
How far are we from a world of safer social media? Scott Morton thinks there’s reason to be optimistic. Indeed, considering how long it took to rein in exploitative practices in products such as cigarettes and credit cards, there’s an argument that social media regulation is on a fast track.
Lawmakers and regulators are paying more attention because “today, the harms are really much more visible to everybody,” Scott Morton says. “I think the younger generation is speaking up more and they understand it. The Europeans are moving quickly. So all of that is, I think, creating an environment where there might really be some progress.”
In the recent elections in India, voters faced a dizzying choice between candidates and political parties.
Around the world, voters appear to be turning away from traditional political organisations, but can democracy survive without them?
From Knowable Magazine
In 1796, President George Washington lambasted political parties for allowing “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to “subvert the power of the people”.
His indictment seems brutally timely today, just a few months after 147 Republican US congress members publicly challenged results of the most recent US presidential election. But even long before then, many Americans shared Washington’s concern.
The popularity of parties is at a nadir, with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US widely condemned as not only unrepresentative but also hijacked by elites. Indeed, a steadily increasing share of US voters – 38% in 2018 – identify as unaffiliated with either party. That proportion is now larger than the share of voters identifying with either Republicans or Democrats.
It seems to be an international phenomenon. In Europe, for example, traditionally powerful centre-left parties are being accused of ignoring their voters, potentially contributing to a backlash that helped push the United Kingdom into Brexit.
The mounting animosity toward the parties has inspired debate among political scientists. Defenders of the traditional party system contend that democracy depends on strong, organised and trustworthy political factions. “People in politics often try to go around parties, to go directly to the people. But without the parties, we’d have chaos,” says Harvard University political scientist Nancy Rosenblum, who explores the challenges facing political parties today.
Yet a small group of scholars, many of them young, say it’s time to start visualising a more open and direct democracy, with less mediation by parties and professional politicians. Such proposals were seen as “completely fringe” until a decade ago, says Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale University. But events including the 2008 economic crisis and Donald Trump’s 2016 election as president, she says, have enlarged the scope of debate.
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The choice between candidates and the political parties they represent has become a defining feature of most democratic elections (Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
Several trends have sped the declining popularity and power of the parties in the United States. Party-run patronage schemes that rewarded supporters with government jobs have long given way to more meritocratic systems. The rise of independent political action committees has given candidates a source of campaign funding — around $4.5bn (£3.17bn) in the last decade – outside the party channels that once dominated access to campaign money. This has made many candidates more entrepreneurial and less beholden to the party bureaucracy.
Thirdly, parties now determine their candidates through primary elections instead of with meetings of party insiders. Just 17 primaries were held in 1968 – today every state has a primary or caucus. This switch to universal primaries has shifted influence from party veterans to more extreme activists, who are more likely than average voters to vote in primaries, says Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale. In 2018, the Democratic National Committee even cut back on the influence of superdelegates, the hundreds of party VIPs who also had votes in selecting candidates. This was to reassure voters that party officials were listening to them, the DNC’s vice-chair said at the time.
In many parts of the United States, partisan gerrymandering has contributed to making candidates less representative of their constituents by creating “safe seats” for both parties. That means that the winners are, in effect, decided in the primaries that pit Democrats against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans. This phenomenon helps explain the 2018 election of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, then a 28-year-old democratic socialist who had never before held elected office, says Shapiro. Ocasio-Cortez beat an establishment Democrat in a primary in which less than 12% of voters turned out.
Not everyone agrees that political parties are weaker today than they once were. Today’s extreme polarisation means that much of the public is more strongly attached to their own party, says Rosenblum, and party-led voter suppression or voter mobilisation efforts in fact make party leaders more powerful than ever.
Parties serve many other important roles, including facilitating compromise, says Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth University
Still, Shapiro and many other experts believe political parties have suffered a major loss in clout, which in turn has been a loss for democracy in general.
“Political parties are the core institution of democratic accountability because parties, not the individuals who support or comprise them, can offer competing visions of the public good,” write Shapiro and his Yale colleague, Frances Rosenbluth, in a 2018 opinion piece. Voters, they argue, have neither the time nor the background to research costs and benefits of policies and weigh their personal interests against what’s best for the majority in the long run.
To show what can go wrong with single-issue voting that lacks party guidance, Shapiro and Rosenbluth point to California’s notorious Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that sharply restricted increases in property taxes. At first, the measure seemed like a win to many voters. Yet over the years, the new rule also decimated local budgets to the point where California’s per-pupil school spending now ranks near the bottom of a list of the 50 states.
Parties serve many other important roles, including facilitating compromise, says Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth University and Rosenblum’s co-author. As an example, Muirhead points to the US Farm Bill, which the two parties renegotiate roughly every five years. Each time they sit down, “the Democrats want food support for urban people and Republicans want support for farmers, and somehow, they always come to an agreement,” Muirhead says. “The alternative is favouring one side or simply passing nothing at all.”
Perhaps most important, the US’s two main parties have traditionally cooperated in acknowledging their opponents’ legitimacy, as Rosenblum and Muirhead write. Other nations, such as Thailand, Turkey and Germany, have banned political parties that their governments have seen as too destabilising to democracy. American parties’ cooperation has helped keep the peace by reassuring US voters that even if they lose today, they may well win tomorrow. Now, however, this fundamental rule is being broken, say Rosenblum, Muirhead and others, with some party leaders even accusing their opponents of treason.
Despite the tense and often combative party politics in many countries, political parties also find room for compromise and work together (Credit: Bill Greenblatt/Getty Images)
“The key thing going on now is that we have an explicit argument that the opposition party is illegitimate,” says Rosenblum. “Trump has been calling the Democrats the enemy of the people and illegitimate, and saying the election is fraudulent. This is the path to violence, as there’s no way to correct this with another election.”
Political parties throughout the world have lost considerable goodwill and influence, says Shapiro, yet he suggests that rather than ban them or further sap their power we must strengthen them and make them more reliable. He and his colleagues advocate reforming campaign financing, to eliminate the currently chaotic bidding wars for candidates’ loyalties, although that goal continues to be elusive. To combat the rise in extremism, they also urge that the job of redistricting go to nonpartisan commissions instead of gerrymandering.
To further reduce the risk of primaries increasing polarisation, Shapiro proposes that party leaders be allowed to choose candidates if the turnout in a primary election has fallen below 75% of the turnout in the previous general election.
Landemore and her faction contend these ideas don’t match the urgency of the current dilemma. She invites people to imagine how democracy might function with less or even zero reliance on political parties and particularly without costly and potentially corrupting political campaigns. One possibility, she says, would be to randomly appoint groups of citizens, chosen much as today’s juries are, to lead government, while rotating in fixed terms through a permanent “House of the People”. These citizens’ assemblies would be more representative than the current US Congress, wrote Rutgers University philosopher Alexander Guerrero in a 2019 opinion piece, in which he advocated choosing representatives by lottery.
Several European nations have already tried alternatives to party-driven democracy
“In the United States, 140 of the 535 people serving in Congress have a net worth over $2m (£1.4m), 78% are male, 83% are white, and more than 50% were previously lawyers or businesspeople,” he wrote.
Several European nations have already tried alternatives to party-driven democracy. In 2019-20, France held a Citizens’ Convention on Climate, calling on 150 randomly chosen citizens to help devise socially just ways to reduce greenhouse gases. In December 2020, the French President agreed to hold a referendum on one of the convention’s suggestions, the inclusion of climate protection in the national constitution.
And in 2016, the Irish Parliament assembled 99 citizens to deliberate on stubborn issues, including a constitutional ban on abortion. A majority of the assembly proposed that the ban be struck down, after which a national referendum confirmed the result and changed the law – all accomplished without involvement of established political parties.
Despite the limited impact of these efforts to date, Landemore says the tide of public opinion is turning. Just five years ago, colleagues mocked the notion of an “open democracy” at a political science conference, she says, adding: “Five years from now I’m guessing we’ll be completely mainstream.”
I don’t use the term lightly. It sounds harsh because it is harsh. I confess there’s something about avoiding premature, preventable death that brings out the judgement in me.
Its a shame that differing opinions on protecting ourselves from Covid continues on a similarly divisive track that politics has for the last several years. I do not speak entirely for the camps on both sides here. There are always odd exceptions of mixed breeds among us, but as far as I can tell so far, a sizable amount of Conservative and Trumper sympathies are also very gung-ho about going back to eating INSIDE restaurants, gathering among groups of vaccinated or non-vaccinated, and cheerfully eager to drop their masks and make believe things are normal again. The problem is, things are not normal, and saying they are doesn’t make it so. Nor does a politically pressured state governor have a right to say it is by rolling back restrictions or lockdowns. If anyone doesn’t realize the political pressure put on state Governors right now, in spite of medical evidence urging caution, they are burying their heads, or don’t know politics. Again, see above post title.
It’s one thing trying to analyze certain (mostly Florida?) spring breakers, who by ritual indoctrination, get possessed to risk any and every thing for the sake of boozing themselves to unconsciousness, having sex with anyone who looks sideways at them, to proving they know how to define a party at any cost. Its quite another thing to observe the adults doing something that is, while much quieter, also risky.
There are people taking the reopening edicts and their holstered vaccines as a racehorse does at the track when the steel gate flies open for them. “And they’re off!” They can’t wait to do something normal, and they go for it when the first authority figure gives their permission. The problem is, there should only be one type of authority figure here to guide us, Health and medical authority figures. No businessman. No friend or family members. And definitely, no politician.
If you want to know the risk for Covid right now outside a household or controlled bubble, the answer is not radically different than it was six months ago. This goes even if you’ve already been vaccinated. Read it again. It goes even if you’re vaccinated. For some reason, there is a real tone deafness among the populous that doesn’t seem able to understand the language and word choices coming from every public health official, virologist, and virtually all medical professionals right now. For some reason, there is a deafness in the populous to the warnings of the threats of the emerging and established variants.
I get the fatigue. But we’ve come a long way to get here. What’s the rush now? Why is it so necessary to lunge back into the fray while we’re still in the hot middle of this mess? The sun can and will come out. We can not blow the clouds away before they’re ready to blow away. There is still a serious viral overcast. Why is it so imperative right now to open and run into the restaurant where many servers and others remain unvaccinated.
There is no free ticket to immunity here. Even with the vaccines. The variants have already shown concerning resistance. People have gotten reinfected with and without vaccines. There are people with good immune systems who have gotten infected, gone on ventilators, and died. There are many explainable deaths and sickness from Covid. There are also plenty of unexplainable deaths and sickness. Try reading some of those stories, instead of just talking about the elderly and infirm nursing homes victims.
Listen to the national health spokespeople and professional medical consensus, and then blend it with some common sense. Sure this is all hard. It’s been a year. I choose to look at things from the other side. Its actually not been that long a time. And it actually is quite easy.
>MB
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday.
Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent
C.D.C. researchers found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said Friday.Credit…Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press
Federal researchers also found that counties opening restaurantsfor on-premises dining — indoors or outdoors — saw a rise in daily infections about six weeks later, and an increase in Covid-19 death rates about two months later.
The study does not prove cause and effect, but the findings square with other research showing that masks prevent infection and that indoor spaces foster the spread of the virus through aerosols, tiny respiratory particles that linger in the air.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”
On Friday night, the National Restaurant Association, which represents one million restaurants and food service outlets, criticized the C.D.C. study as “an ill-informed attack on the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic.” It pointed out that researchers had not controlled for factors other than restaurant dining — such as business closures and other policies — that might have contributed to coronavirus infections and deaths.
“If a positive correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks is found, that would not mean that ice cream causes shark attacks,” the association said in a statement.
The group also faulted federal researchers for not measuring compliance with safe operating protocols, and it noted that the research did not distinguish between indoor dining or outdoor dining, nor whether restaurants had adhered to distancing recommendations or had adequate ventilation.
“It is irresponsible to pin the spread of Covid-19 on a single industry,” the association said.
The findings come as city and state officials nationwide grapple with growing pressure to reopen schools and businesses amid falling rates of new cases and deaths. Officials have recently permitted limited indoor dining in New York City. On Thursday, Connecticut’s governor said the state would be ending capacity limits later this month on restaurants, gyms and offices. Masks are still required in both locales.
“The study is not surprising,” said Joseph Allen, an associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the university’s Healthy Buildings program. “What’s surprising is that we see some states ignoring all of the evidence and opening up quickly, and removing mask mandates and opening full dining.”
Other researchers said the new study confirmed the idea that viral transmission often takes place through the air, that physical distancing may not be sufficient to halt the spread in some settings, and that masks at least partly block airborne particles.
President Biden’s health advisers have said in recent days that now is not the time to relax. As of Thursday, the seven-day average of new cases was still 62,924 a day, according to a database maintained by The New York Times.
Mr. Biden on Wednesday criticized the decisions by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to lift statewide mask mandates and reopen businesses without restrictions, calling the plans “a big mistake” that reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
The president, who has asked Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office, said it was critical for public officials to follow the guidance of doctors and public health leaders as the coronavirus vaccination campaign gains momentum. As of Thursday, about 54 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
“It may seem tempting, in the face of all of this progress, to try to rush back to normalcy as if the virus is in the rearview mirror,” Andy Slavitt, a White House adviser on the pandemic, said on Friday. “It’s not.”
Diners in San Antonio on Wednesday. Credit…Eric Gay/Associated Press
C.D.C. researchers examined the associations between mask mandates, indoor or outdoor restaurant dining, and coronavirus infections and deaths last year between March 1 and Dec. 31. The agency relied on county-level data from state government websites and measured daily percentage change in coronavirus cases and deaths.
Infections and deaths declined after counties mandated mask use, the agency found. Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
The report’s authors concluded that mask mandates were linked to statistically significant decreases in coronavirus cases and death rates within 20 days of implementation. On-premises dining at restaurants, indoors or outdoors, was associated with rising case and death rates 41 to 80 days after reopenings.
“State mask mandates and prohibiting on-premises dining at restaurants help limit potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2, reducing community transmission of Covid-19,” the authors wrote.
Shortly after publishing the report, the C.D.C. amended it, urging establishments that resume serving diners to follow agency guidelines for reducing transmission in restaurants.
“The message is, if restaurants are going to open for on-premise dining, it’s important to follow C.D.C. guidelines to do so safely and effectively,” said Gery P. Guy, a scientist with the C.D.C.’s Covid response team and the study’s corresponding author.
That includes “everything from having staff stay home when they show signs of Covid or have tested positive or been in contact with someone who has Covid, and requiring masks among employees as well as customers who are not actively eating or drinking,” Dr. Guy said.
Other steps include adequate ventilation, options to eat outdoors, spacing customers six feet apart, encouraging frequent hand washing, and sanitizing of surfaces that are touched a lot, such as cash registers or pay terminals, door handles and tables.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, low or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
Linsey Marr, an expert on aerosol transmission at Virginia Tech, said Americans could not be expected to follow all the latest science, and so many simply rely on what is open or closed as an indicator of what is safe.
But indoor dining is particularly risky, she added. People typically sit in a restaurant for an hour or more and don’t wear masks while eating, leaving them vulnerable to airborne virus.
“Limiting capacity will help reduce the risk of transmission, but indoor dining is still a high-risk activity until more people are vaccinated,” she said.
Restaurant workers are particularly exposed. While they can wear masks, diners do not, reducing protection against the virus. And workers spend many hours inside with every shift, Dr. Allen said.
He recommended that restaurant workers double-mask, wearing a surgical mask covered by a cloth mask, or buy high-efficiency masks like N95s, typically reserved for health care workers, or KN95 or KF94 masks, taking steps to assure they are not counterfeit.
“Now is not the time to let our guard down and pull back on the controls when we’re so close to having a lot of people vaccinated,” Dr. Allen said.
College students crowded the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on March 11.
Reading the latest CDC guidelines, as well as recognizing some states’ loosening, one would hope, think, we are moving in the right direction. Its something at least. Right?
But, given the UK B1.1.7 variant (already dominating the U.S.), the So. African B1.351, and the P.1, both here ashore as well, albeit expected, I wonder if this loosening up is fueled more by politics, especially state and local, than science. No matter the Democratic President or the appointed CDC head.
Factor in the dumbfounded recent decisions in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, all now wide open states, who gather and travel amok, plus the 50%-80% higher transmission rate of the new variants, plus the increase in severity levels, plus the still open question of transmitting the virus even if vaccinated and/or asymptomatic, and I’m not sure how to relax at all outside of the tightest, most trustworthy bubble of a single household, or maybe two, that are almost clones of each other’s controlled activity patterns.
People gather for spring break on the beach in Port Aransas, Texas on, Friday, March 12, 2021.
Politics aside, which is already barely possible to remove from the current guidance, the new guidance right now, today, is positive. BUT, when the guidance is merged, as it must be, with aggregated human behavior right now, today, it becomes a different calculation. One with a bold asterisk.
A look back at the past year, and already questionable current activity, is enough to see how thoughtless, selfish, ultimately clueless human behaviors can always upset any positive outcome of scientific trajectory. No matter how promising it might sound in the beginning.
States like Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and all the other usual actors defying common sense, are already playing the same losing hands as recklessly as they did last Summer of 2020. We know what then followed in this country.
I wish I could fully embrace the new CDC guidelines, including the state where I live, but I just can’t. I honestly don’t even know why anyone could.
>MB
Related News:
CORONAVIRUS IN CONNECTICUT Experts concerned that rolling back restrictions will cause a COVID surge in CT
Connecticut Post March 9, 2021
Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to loosen COVID-19 restrictions has experts concerned about an increase in coronavirus cases and possibly deaths.
“I am concerned that we, yet again, have lulled ourselves into a false belief that we have gotten SARS-CoV-2 under control,” said immunologist Kristian G. Andersen on Twitter. “We’re getting close — much closer, in fact — but we’re not there. Yet.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, told National Public Radio Wednesday that although cases are dropping, the pandemic is not over yet.
“I think the next two or three months could go in one of two directions,” Walensky said on NPR following the Texas governor’s decsion to recind that state’s mask mandate. “If things open up, if we’re not really cautious, we could end up with a post-spring break surge the way we saw a post-Christmas surge. We could see much more disease. We could see much more death. In an alternative vision, I see we really hunker down for a couple of more months, we get so many people vaccinated and we get to a really great place by summer.”
Lamont announced Thursday that capacity limits will be lifted for restaurants and other businesses, though social-distancing rules and mask mandates will still be in effect.
Under the new rules, social and recreational gatherings will be limited to 25 people indoors and 100 people outdoors. Sports teams will be allowed to practice and compete again, and venues will be allowed to include 100 people indoors and 200 outdoors.
The loosened restrictions take effect on March 19, 2021.
Excellent points here on the dishonest, and/or, incompetent ruling and opinions from the Conservative Supreme Court justices. When opinions like this are heard from anyone, most dismayingly, from federal judges, it really is impossible to believe they are literate. MB
Supreme Court’s scientifically illiterate decision will cost lives
Opinion by Jeffrey D. Sachs
November 27, 2020
(CNN)Last month, I wrote that Amy Coney Barrett would help to usher in a new post-truth jurisprudence on the Supreme Court. While I had cited her anti-science statements on climate change, her arrival on the court has created a new 5-4 majority against public-health science at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When it ruled this week against New York state’s decision to limit religious gatherings in a few high-incidence parts of New York City, the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence.
The immediate effect on New York City is moot because the state had already lifted the particular orders under review. The grave, imminent danger lies in the rest of the country, where public health authorities will feel hamstrung to restrict religious gatherings even when the virus is spreading out of control.
The two cases under review were brought by two religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. Both objected to stringent limits on religious gatherings in particularly hard-hit neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The court’s five conservative justices, a new majority with Barrett now on the bench, argued that the state’s limits on religious gatherings violated “the minimum requirement of neutrality” to religion under the First Amendment.
The court majority characterized the violation of neutrality this way:
“In a red zone, while a synagogue or church may not admit more than 10 persons, businesses categorized as ‘essential’ may admit as many people as they wish. And the list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities.”
In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch opines as follows:
“So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience? … The only explanation for treating religious places differently seems to be a judgment that what happens there just isn’t as ‘essential’ as what happens in secular spaces. Indeed, the Governor is remarkably frank about this: In his judgment laundry and liquor, travel and tools, are all ‘essential’ while traditional religious exercises are not. That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued similarly:
“The State argues that it has not impermissibly discriminated against religion because some secular businesses such as movie theaters must remain closed and are thus treated less favorably than houses of worship. But under this Court’s precedents, it does not suffice for a State to point out that, as compared to houses of worship, some secular businesses are subject to similarly severe or even more severe restrictions … Rather, once a State creates a favored class of businesses, as New York has done in this case, the State must justify why houses of worship are excluded from that favored class.”
The problem is that the apparently scientifically illiterate majority on the court missed the entire point of the restriction on religious services. Gorsuch mistakenly claims that New York state deems laundry and liquor as essential but religious services as not essential. That is false. Kavanaugh mistakenly claims that New York state failed to justify why houses of worship are excluded from the “favored class” of businesses with lesser restrictions. This too is false.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, writing in the minority, explained the basic scientific facts that were completely overlooked by the majority:
“But JUSTICE GORSUCH does not even try to square his examples with the conditions medical experts tell us facilitate the spread of COVID-19: large groups of people gathering, speaking, and singing in close proximity indoors for extended periods of time … Unlike religious services, which ‘have every one of th(ose) risk factors,’ … bike repair shops and liquor stores generally do not feature customers gathering inside to sing and speak together for an hour or more at a time. (‘Epidemiologists and physicians generally agree that religious services are among the riskiest activities’). Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”
In fact, the great risks for transmission are indoor places like religious services, restaurants, concert halls and theaters where large groups are together for a considerable period of time, typically an hour or more. As Justices Sotomayor and Kagan point out, “New York treats houses of worship far more favorably than their secular comparators,” by “requiring movie theaters, concert venues, and sporting arenas subject to New York’s regulation to close entirely, but allowing houses of worship to open subject to capacity restrictions.”
A recent study by Stanford University researchers published in Nature Magazine made the same point regarding the highest risks of viral transmission: “on average across metro areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations, and limited-service restaurants produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened.”
What is especially disappointing in the Supreme Court decision is that the lower court had made the correct points very clearly in a decision that was brazenly overlooked by the majority decision. The Federal District Court had noted that: “Among the other problematic features of religious gatherings, congregants arrive and leave at the same time, physically greet one another, sit or stand close together, share or pass objects, and sing or chant in a way that allows for airborne transmission of the virus.”
None of this is to argue that New York state’s regulations were perfectly drawn. That is not the point. The point is that the Supreme Court should be on the side of saving lives and urging rational, science-based behavior by all, especially at this moment of maximum peril to the population. Even more than the Supreme Court, religious groups should also be siding actively and energetically with public health authorities, both to protect their own congregants and all of society. Pope Francis succored Catholics around the world by shifting to an online Mass in response to the quarantine. His recent New York Times op-ed eloquently makes the point that the common good takes precedence over simplistic appeals to “personal freedom” in protests against justified public health measures.
Our religious faiths are the great teachers of the supreme value of human life, and they can be great healers for those in mental distress during the pandemic. The message to the American people should be a united one, with the nation’s faith leaders, public health specialists, the politicians and, yes, Supreme Court justices using scientific knowledge combined with compassion to end the pandemic with the maximum speed and the least further suffering and loss of life.
(Feb. 13, 2020 file photo) President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Federal Reserve, Judy Shelton, appears before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to the Federal Reserve is facing a razor-close vote in Congress. The Senate is voting Tuesday on the nomination of Judy Shelton to join the Federal Reserve’s powerful board of governors. Shelton is an unusually caustic critic of the Fed and is opposed by three Republican senators. Expected absences from two other Republicans could block her from advancing in Tuesday’s vote. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,)
Encouraging news from a recent Senate not known for any. MB
Senate Blocks President Trump’s Controversial Nominee To The Federal Reserve Board
by Vanessa Romo
NPR – November 17, 2020
The 47-50 vote came as Sens. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins sided with Democratic senators to preserve a filibuster of Judy Shelton’s confirmation. Two other Republicans missed the vote.
