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CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: The Problem with P-Values (Incentives) Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values.We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Voice Platforms: Open Alternative is an Opportunity. There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Martin Luther King Jr Supported Basic Income. We have the USV office closed today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” he wrote: In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they areindirect.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Homo Deus by Yuval Harari (Book Review) I previously wrote a review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, which I highly recommended, despite fundamentally disagreeing with one of its central arguments.Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Homo Deus.While the book asks incredibly important questions about the future of humanity, it not only comes up short on answers, but, moredisappointingly, it
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Liberate Apps Through Protocols: Lets Update IRC! One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns.* Home
* Archive
* Tech Tuesday
* Uncertainty Wednesday* About
CAPITAL IS SUFFICIENT (PART 2) In last week’s post,
I provided some data on how much physical capital has grown in the last one hundred years. When measured by certain proxies, such as the production of steel, it looks like about a 30x growth in the last 100 years and nearly 100x if you go back just two decades further to 1900. We also saw that significant growth has occurred since World War II, which as a first approximation is at least a 10x growth. Now someone might suggest that this growth could all be due to the population explosion, but that’s not the case. Over the same timeframe the global population has grown a lot less: from 1900 to today a bit less than 5x and from the end of World War II to today only by a bit more than 3x. Put differently, the increase in physical capital has far outstripped population growth.
Now one might still question whether this capital is sufficient to meet everyone’s needs as I have asserted. I believe that the strongest evidence for my claim comes from considering what happened during World War II. Here is a chart that shows how government share of GDP in the US spiked during the war years.
Let’s dive a bit deeper and look at the manufacturing efforts. The US ramped production of tanks, airplanes, battleships and guns at an extraordinary clip in the war years. Here is a table that tabulates this for different weapons systems.
The numbers are staggering. For example, in 1943 the US built 2654 major naval vessels. That’s more than 7 every day, or roughly one every three and half hours! In 1944 the US built over 74 thousand combat aircraft, that’s about 8.5 combat aircraft *every hour*. We are not talking about simple devices here. These are complex high-performance systems with many components (think of the aircraft engines alone!). And that’s just the US production. There were similar scale efforts in Germany, Japan, the UK, and Russia. For example, adding up all the combat aircraft production in 1944 is 185 thousand units, which is 21 aircraft every hour. Now here in the US while all of this production was happening, people were not starving, there was enough clothing, and were doing surprisingly well overall.
But as we saw in last week’s post,
the production of cars dropped dramatically — so how were people’s transportation needs met during this time? Through a massive increase in public transportation. The
connection was made quite explicitly with the government running ads “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.”
This is a perfect illustration of separating a need, transportation, from its solutions, in this case individual versus shared mobility. The continued ability to meet needs while at the same time repurposing half or more of physical capital strongly supports the claim of sufficient capital. As a first approximation much of that capital was previously used to meet wants. And it went back to meeting wants after World War II which partially explains the tremendous economic boom ofthe post war years.
All of this is to say that today’s economy with at least an order of magnitude more capital than during World War II can easily meet our needs. Importantly it also means that we have plenty of additional capacity that could be allocated to solving the climate crisis. For example, we could dramatically ramp the production of everything from solar panels to nuclear reactors to heat pumps. But there is more to be gleaned from what happened during World War II production. It isn’t just that we collectively made a lot of complicated stuff rapidly. We also innovated on extremely compressed time scales. The Manhattan project is the most obvious example of that which in a span of three years developed the nuclear bomb. It is hard to exaggerate how extensive this effort was, including for example uranium mining, as well as the exploration of several different bombdesigns.
Important technologies were either invented or significantly advancedduring World War II
.
For example, at the beginning of the war, radar was a nascent technology. Towards the end of World War II through the invention of the cavity magnetron, the
Allies managed to build radars small and lightweight enough to put on planes. Penicillin, which had been discovered in 1928, was not widely used until mass production was unlocked as part of a secretive WorldWar II effort
.
Production and deployment at high volume also drove important improvements. Take fighter planes as an example. Early fighters had limited range which meant that bombers had to fly into enemy territory without escorts. Their only defense against local fighters were plane mounted machine guns. It was only as the war went on that escortfighters
of
sufficient range were developed to accompany bombers. This was made possible by a combination of technological advances, such as more powerful engines, and the insights gained from battle. So what are the key takeaways? First, during peacetime mode much of the capital is used to meet wants not needs (the third installment in this post will look at this with regard to all the needs identified). Second, when switched into wartime mode, much of the productive capital can be redirected quickly towards accomplishing specific goals that are different from needs. This was already true at a much lower amount of physical capital per capita than is available today. Third, innovation can in fact be accelerated dramatically by focusing resources on critical problems. The obvious threat we are facing today that requires a massive reallocation of – and improvement in – capital is the climate crisis . Whether this can be accomplished is determined entirely by what we choose to pay attention to. Hence, the defining scarcity of our time is attention,not capital.
Posted: 29th May 2021– 2 Comments
Tags: world after capitalclimate crisis
capital
USV TEAM POSTS
* Fred Wilson — Jun 4, 2021 FUNDING FRIDAY: TERRA * Nick Grossman — Jun 3, 2021 SCALING ETHEREUM WITH ZKSYNC ------------------------- CAPITAL IS SUFFICIENT (PART 1) In a push to wrap up my book The World After Capitalto a point where I
will make a print copy available, I am finally tackling the appendix one more time. The goal of the appendix is to provide more data to show that physical capital is no longer humanity’s binding constraint. Or in the language of the book, the goal is to show that physical capital is sufficient.
The plan of attack is as follows. I will first be pulling together some general data on global physical capital (this is today’s post). I will then use some data from World War II to show what can be accomplished when there is a decision to redirect physical capital towards fighting a specific crisis. Finally I plan to examine the sufficiency of capital with respect to our human needs.
It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find global data on physical capital. The best source I have been able to locate is the World Bank, which publishes a data series on gross capital formation.
Unfortunately the data here reaches back only to 1970 but it still shows an increase from roughly $5 trillion to $22 trillion in 2019 (this is measured on constant 2010 dollars, i.e. adjusted forinflation).
For triangulation it is worth considering the output of some things that require productive capacity. Put differently we can infer the availability of physical capital through outputs. To that end, I was able to find the following chart of global crude steel productionover time
Compared to gross capital there is only about a twofold growth here from 1970 to today, but it is important to keep in mind that during that time period we have come up with many materials other than steel from which to make things, such as aluminum and of course plastics. Importantly though this graph lets us compare steel output today with output at the time of World War II and we can see that there has been more than an order of magnitude growth (roughly 15x). What about finished goods production? This too is of course a good proxy for the amount of total available physical capital. A great example is the global production of cars.
Here is a chart that shows it over time going back to the earliest days of the industry. Here again we can see a roughly twofold increase relative to the 1970s and a greater 10x increase if we go back further. This chart has an important feature worth pointing out now: there is a dip to near zero production in the mid 1940s corresponding to World War II. Here is a dramatic example of what all this productive capacity makes possible. The first commercially available handheld mobile phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x which became available in 1984. Here is the growth of mobile phonessince then
,
measured in active subscriptions (these are totaled from publishedcarrier statistics)
Over the course of three decades we basically went from not having mobile phones to having more than the global population (this of course brings to mind William Gibson’s great quote that “he future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” – with many people having two mobile phones, one for work and oner personal for example, while others have none). And here is one more example that’s highly relevant to the climate crisis : the rate at which we have produced solar panels.
Over a decade and a half we went from basically making none, to making 150 Gigawatts in new panels on what looks like an exponential growth trajectory. Now crucially we are currently using a small part of our productive capital to make solar panels. How do we know this? Because we have not yet taken the drastic steps necessary to fighting the climate crisis, which will eventually have to reach levels similar to the resource deployment in World War II. What is possible when a larger part of the economy is pointed at a specific challenge will be the next post. Posted: 19th May 2021– 3 Comments
Tags: world after capitalcapital
climate crisis
CHIARA MARLETTO: THE SCIENCE OF CAN AND CAN’T (BOOK REVIEW) Quantum mechanics and general relativity, the last two foundational breakthroughs in science, are a century old each. Since then we have made tons of progress in more applied science, such as learning to decode and manipulate DNA and RNA, but we have been in a rut when it comes to developing a deeper understanding of such fundamental phenomena as information and heat. I believe that this lack of a new fundamental breakthrough is contributor to an overall slowing down of scientific progress that has been widely noted. In her wonderful book “The Science of Can and Can’t”
Chiara Marletto
takes us on a fascinating journey into the foundations of scientific theories. Newtonian (classical) mechanics, quantum mechanics and general relativity all share the same structure: a description of states of the world combined with laws of motion which govern how states evolve. This approach has proven incredibly powerful but also has important limits. Chiara introduces an alternative approach called Constructor Theory , which she has been developing together with David Deutsch and a small team at Oxford. Instead of states and laws of motion. Constructor Theory builds upon the distinction between possible and impossible transformations (hence the title of the book). In doing so, Constructor Theory makes counterfactuals first class elements of science, i.e. statements about what could be or could have been, but maybe has not (yet) occurred. The book does a terrific job explaining why this matters and what Constructor Theory is seeking to accomplish. Let me provide just a few hints. First, a precise theory of such phenomena as heat, which current theories approach statistically. Second, a unification of our understanding of classical and quantum information theories. Third, a theory of quantum computing that is abstracted from quantum mechanics (our theory of classical computation after all isn’t tied to classical mechanics or electric fields). One of the many lovely illustrations from the book: There is also an important philosophical aspect to this new approach. In our existing theories there is exceedingly little room for freedom. In the strictest application of the laws of motion approach the fact that I am writing these words right now was already determined eons ago. In fact everything that’s happening is just the deterministic consequence of prior states via the laws of motion (this is even true for the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics). Constructor Theory, on the other hand, by allowing for counterfactuals, cracks space wide open for meaningful constructs of human freedom and agency. What is highly unusual about this book is that it provides an introduction accessible to lay readers to a theory that is currently under active development. This is a bit akin to being able to look over the shoulder of someone like Bohr or Einstein while they were working on their breakthroughs. This serves as an invitation to follow along on a journey that will be ongoing for many years. There is no way to read the book and not marvel simultaneously at how far we have come and how much still lies ahead. Full disclosure: Susan and I have been supporting Chiara’s research for several years and thus aren’t exactly unbiased observers of the importance of her work. Posted: 17th May 2021– 1 Comment
Tags: book review
science constructor theory SOME NOTES ON FUNDRAISING Over the last two decades I have helped many companies raise venture capital rounds. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. If your company is growing like crazy you will have an easy time fundraising and you can ignore pretty much everything that follows. Put differently, what I am writing here is for companies where the ability to raise money is somewhat in question. Fundraising is selling. You are literally getting money in return for selling a part of your company. Because fundraising is selling, many of the lessons from how to be effective at sales apply directly to fundraising. This starts with the crucial need for qualification of who you are talking to. Build a broad funnel so that you can qualify hard. Otherwise you will wind up spending a lot of time with VC firms that will never get there. How do you qualify firms? Through an initial conversation where you figure out such things as do they seem to know the space you are operating in? What is their process and are you talking to the right people? The second crucial insight from selling is that your goal is to get from push mode into pull mode as quickly as possibly. What do I mean by that? You want to stop talking and let the investors ask questions. That means the investors are engaged and ideally are starting to sell themselves on the opportunity. A bad pitch is one where you do all the talking. A good one is where the investors are tripping over themselves to ask questions. So what does this imply? Keep your pitch geared towards being intriguing rather than trying to answer everyquestion upfront.
Closely related: be prepared for questions. I recommend to every company that I work with on a fundraise to keep a written FAQ. For every question you are likely to get have a succinct answer ready. A strong answer will be short and whenever possible will include both an abstract argument and a concrete example or statistic. For example a question about gross margins might be answered by saying: “We are currently at x% but can already see the beginning of scale effects that are allowing us to reduce our bill of materials by y% for each time we double output.” The crucial art of giving an answer is to deliver it firmly and then shut up. Nine times out of ten that’s it and the conversation will move on to a different question. The confident delivery of the answer will increase investor confidence in what you are doing. Conversely a meandering answer raises more questions. Only one times out of ten the investors will actually want to go deep. Now the opposite is the case. You need to come along and really go deep as opposed to try to head off the question. Ideally you already have several slides ready that you can use to go deep but if not just engage in the discussion. As you meet with firms keep the FAQ updated with new questions. What about the deck itself? Here we are getting into fairly subjective territory, so what follows next may or may not work for you based on your own style of delivery (e.g. some people do well with many slides that they present briefly, others better with fewer slides to which they speak at more length). Still I find the following to beimportant.
First, you only have a relatively short time upfront to grab people’s attention. So ideally you start with a hook. Something provocative or at least surprising works well here (again if you are growing like crazy, that would simply be your growth slide). Second, keep each slide to one clear message that’s easily discernible from the title of the slide. Many times someone in the audience will be momentarily distracted (e.g. by an incoming text message) and when they look back it needs to be easy for them to figure out what’s going on or you have lost them for good. Third, no matter if you go withe many or few slides, keep each slide as visual and as uncluttered as possible. Less is more. Fourth, make only your strongest points. For example, if your product has a long list of advantages, talking about all the ancillary ones will actually detract from the central ones, so stick to those. Fifth, if your business has an obvious weakness, address it in the presentation and be upfront and non-defensive about it. This is especially true for businesses that have been around for a while andhad a setback.
Tying everything together: your task is to tell an interesting story that engages the audience. The second the audience starts to engage (from push to pull) you need to stop talking at them and enter what Adam Grant in his new book “ThinkAgain
”
calls a “dance.” If you do this with the right firms (thanks to qualification) then good things will result. Posted: 14th May 2021– 1 Comment
Tags: startups vcfundraising
CLIMATE 101: PART 3 ACTIONS This is the third installment in a three part series on the climate crisis originally presented for The Spark of Hudson. Following a first
talk about causes
and a second one about solutions,
this one addresses what actions we can take. As with the prior ones, you can find the slides online as well.
Posted: 10th May 2021– 1 Comment
Tags: climate crisisspark of hudson
CLIMATE 101: PART 2 SOLUTIONS This is the second of a series of talks I gave for The Spark of Hudsonabout the climate
crisis (check out Part 1 Causes).
While titled solutions it really digs deeper into the causes. The goal is for listeners to be able to decide for themselves which kinds of solutions are likely to be effective based on having a deeper understanding of why atmospheric greenhouse gases are piling up rapidly. Video is below and the deck is accessible online as well.
Posted: 5th May 2021– 1 Comment
Tags: climate crisisspark of hudson
CLIMATE 101: PART 1 CAUSES Susan and I are developing a learning and community center called The Spark of Hudson. As the name
suggests it is in the City of Hudson . While the physical building won’t be renovated until 2022, we have started to deliver a variety of online programming.
I gave a three part presentation on the climate crisis. Part 1: Causes is below as video and the deck is available online as well.
Parts 2 and 3 have already taken place as well and I will post them here over the coming days. Posted: 28th April 2021– 3 Comments
Tags: climate crisisspark of hudson
CARL HART: DRUG USE FOR GROWN UPS (BOOK REVIEW) Having enjoyed Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” on psychedelics (in particular psilocybin), I was intrigued by a book that goes much broader on drug use: Dr. Carl Hart ’s “Drug Use for Grown Ups.”
Hart is a professor of psychology at Columbia and is basing this book on both his research and his extensive personal experience. While I have one criticism (more on that later), the book makes a very strong case that drugs should be decriminalized broadly: not just marijuana, but everything, including drugs with such terrible reputations as methand heroin.
Here are three insights I came away with: First, the majority of drug related deaths come from drug interactions (e.g. people drinking a lot of alcohol and then also taking a drug) or from accidental overdoses due to much higher potency of mixed in / substituted drugs (e.g. heroin stretched with fentanyl). So if you can be responsible on drug interactions, and well-informed on what you are consuming, you can dramatically reduce risk. Same goes for getting started slowly on dosage on anything you don’t yet have a tolerance for. Second, the existing drug laws and their enforcement are terribly racially skewed. I sort of knew some of that but the total amount of evidence provided by Hart makes that case forcefully. For example, at one point the mandatory sentencing threshold for crack was a hundred times lower (5 mg) than that for cocaine (500 mg), despite these being the identical drug just in different form, with usage breaking down clearly along racial lines. Another data point he provides is that in one city 96% of all drug arrests were of black people. There are many more throughout the book. Third, there are interesting new drugs that I had never even heard of before. For instance, I had completely missed the recent extensive development synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones. Hart makes an interesting argument for how the banning of these new drugs creates an arms race between drug developers and regulators to the detriment of anyone using these drugs. As new drugs get added to the register of controlled substances they get replaced by even newer ones but now people once again don’t know what they are taking. So what is my criticism? Hart, who had started his academic career convinced drugs were bad, clearly had a Saulus to Paulus conversion. And like most converts he comes on really strong. Now that may be a strategy for positioning the book, recognizing that criticism will help it become better known. Still I feel that the book lacks a chapter on addiction and is on occasion too dismissive on downsides, despite acknowledging that some users wind up having issues. I would also appreciate a longer science appendix and/or companion website that goes into more detail on some of the studies. Hart makes strong claims, which require strong evidence. All in all I recommend reading “Drug Use for Grownups.” The case for changing the laws is extremely compelling and I hope that marijuana legislation is just the beginning. PS Reading the book also reminded me to write a post supporting the decriminalization of sex work.
Posted: 18th April 2021– 2 Comments
Tags: drugs
decriminalization
books
MASK MANDATES WERE EFFECTIVE Yesterday I took a day off after my second vaccine shot and promptly made the mistake of getting myself into a Twitter fightabout
the effectiveness of mask mandates (sadly the other party deleted their tweets leaving only my side – despite making good points that had me thinking). I compounded this mistake by citing a paperthat I
felt (and still feel) provides data in support of such mandates but had attracted the ire of a bunch of epidemiologists who had called forits retraction.
The good news is that all of this got me to look more seriously at the data, as well as at other research. On the basis of this I am confirming my assessment that mask mandates were justified and that more states should have implemented them early on. But first a step back. What go this whole thing going? Well I noticed a bunch of people on Twitter claiming that mask mandates never worked (and I suppose by implication should have never been issued). What do they base this claim on? Well in recent months it appears that states which have lifted their mask mandates have fared similar to ones that still have them as can be seen in the following chart: Now I don’t find this convincing because we are deep into this pandemic and at this point people’s mask wearing behavior is much more likely to be influenced by what they know about them than by a mandate. This is not dissimilar from seat belts. If you removed the seatbelt mandate in some states tomorrow but not in others, I highly doubt you would suddenly get a massive shift in seat belt wearingbehavior.
Why? Because people aren’t stupid. That is people recognize when a technology provides a real safety advantage. True for seat belts and true for masks for an airborne virus. This is different from saying that there aren’t some stupid people, because, well, there are. So if you want to look for evidence of the effectiveness of mask mandates you have to look early in the pandemic, not late. That’s what the paper in questiondid,
which was published in June of 2020. It accumulates a bunch of evidence from different sources, including the following chart: Here is why I think this chart provides evidence for the effectiveness of a mask mandate. New York City, which was hit by one of the hardest early outbreaks had rapidly spiking cases. Social distancing measures helped bend that curve down, but there is another distinct change in trajectory following the mask mandate. So simply based on a comparison with itself (not with the rest of the US, which I will get to in a second) this is evidence supporting the effectiveness of a maskmandate.
Now let me comment briefly on the retraction letter that was signed by a whole bunch of professors. At this point in time we already knew that the virus was airborne, as they thankfully note in the letter. So when it comes to public health measures our prior should be that masks work. When you see a chart that shows a mask mandate bending down the curve that is further evidence supporting this position. In a pandemic with exponential growth potential every day matters. So asking for better statistical evidence, as the letter does, is an egregious reversal of the burden of proof. There would have to be strong evidence that mask mandates do NOT work. Now admittedly the paper makes some silly mistakes such as saying that only NY had a mask mandate in April. It is true that a few other states did also, but if anything that makes the comparison to the rest of the US stronger, not weaker. I should also note that NY was the only state with a comprehensive mask mandate in April. In any case though I wondered what the data would look like if one compared the four states with mask mandates as of April 15, 2020 (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland) with the rest of the country. The data is easily availableand it took
me about 30 minutes of Excel wrangling (well Apple Pages, but same difference) to produce the following graph (blue are new cases in states with early mask mandates, green are the rest of the US both scaled to per 1000 person): So similarly strong evidence that states with mask mandates (this now covers 47 million people or 14% of the US population) achieved a much bigger turnaround in new infections per thousand than did those without. Note also that this turnaround was much harder to accomplish given the more explosive initial growth in those states. But might this not be a case of Simpson’s paradox?
States peaking later and later could aggregate up to form such a pattern also. But looking at the state level data rules that out. The first wave crested pretty much all across the US by the end of April (even in South Dakota,
which is about as far from either coast as you can get). What about the fact that maybe some states had not yet ramped up their testing and were undercounting cases? Absolutely. It is possible that there would have been a hump for the states that had no mask mandates and hence a downward slope after that even without a mask mandate. But even with testing ramped further as time goes on (into June) new cases for early mask mandate states go significantly below that for the restof the country.
Of course, it turns out not to be hard to find other studies coming to similar conclusions about the effectiveness of mask mandates. Here is one at the state level(also
from June 2020), a later state level studyusing
hospitalization data, and another one at the county level(in Kansas).
So bottomline: there is strong evidence from the early phases of the pandemic that mask mandates work and that they would have saved lots of lives had they been broadly adopted. And notes to self: first, don’t engage in a Twitter fight on a day off and second, pick a less controversial paper to make your point. Posted: 9th April 2021– 6 Comments
Tags: covid masks SUPPORTING THE OTHER DECRIMINALIZATION: SEX WORK New York State finally passed a bill that legalizes marijuana and justly releases people serving time for the kind of drug crimes that now are no more. The enforcement of the drug bans were always super racially skewed, primarily targeting people of color. Carl Hart’s “Drug Use for Grownups”
really drives home just how misguided the war on drugs has been. There is another less discussed area where criminalization has led to similar issues and that is sex work. In sex work too law enforcement skews heavily towards minorities and marginalized groups. And much as with drugs it is motivated by a kind of moral panic based largely on preposterous exaggeration of the actual data (such as ridiculous statistics about sex trafficking associated with the Super Bowl).
Let me be clear: coercing people to do anything is a crime and should be persecuted — whether that is for farm work or sex work or anything else for that matter. And of course we have laws that make various forms of coercion, such as blackmail, illegal. I first became interested in this issue when the state attorney generals bandied together to go after the Craigslist adult services section. I am pretty sure that there were cases of sex trafficking that involved Craigslist. Nonetheless, thinking that the way to solve that problem is by getting Craigslist to shut down that section of the site portrays either a deep misunderstanding about how the internet works or simply grandstanding on an issue perceived as a political winner. To see just how upside down the rhetoric is compared to the reality of enforcement, one need to look no further than 2019 operation in Florida that garnered national headlines because it was geographically close to Mar-a-Lago and one of the men charged with solicitation was Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. In the early reporting this was characterized as a major human trafficking bust. Fast forward to today and the only ones actually charged with anything are the women who worked there (entirely voluntarily as it turns out).
The sex trafficking panic has also been weaponized to reshape online content and payments at scale. SESTA/FOSTA is legislation that made it illegal to host any content that might be supporting sex trafficking.
While initially opposed by a broad coalition, not unlike PIPA/SOPA ,that collapsed as Facebook decided to come out in support of the legislation as a way of currying favor with regulators. As predicted by sex workers and others, this resulted in lots of useful information being removed from the internet. And of course the same panic has been used to justify payments companies shutting off services for Pornhub and is also behind the latest attack on Onlyfans.
For added clarity: I am not saying that Pornhub or Onlyfans are problem free, I am simply arguing that the wholesale treatment of these in ways that overnight cut off the livelihoods of many people is the kind of intervention that does significantly more harm than good. Much of this could be avoided by decriminalizing sex work and instead focusing on the much rarer cases of actual trafficking or coercion. This focus would be made easier by decriminalization because now victims wouldn’t be afraid to come forward because of fear of arrest (they might still of course be afraid of a trafficker, so decriminalization is not a panacea). There are many good overviews of arguments for sex workdecriminalization
and there are organizations one can support, such as DecrimNY.
Posted: 5th April 2021– 10 Comments
Tags: decrim
decriminalization
sex work
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About Albert Wenger
I am a partner at Union Square Ventures . My wife Susan Danziger co-founded and runs Ziggeo . Together we have three wonderful children. Enjoy reading!Details
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