The media is full of anti-Chinese bigotry, but rarely in as pure a form as this classic Daily Mail headline:

Further evidence emerges that China hid coronavirus truth from the world as study says Covid was circulating in Italy in September 2019

And the story itself is even worse.

So let me get this straight. We know that Covid-19 originated in China. How do we know? Because the Chinese “patient zero” got sick on November 17, 2019. That was the very first known case of Covid-19 in the entire world. So that’s how we know the virus originated in China; the earliest known cases were in China.

According to the Daily Mail, we now know that there were a bunch of Covid-19 cases in Italy in September 2019. I’m not sure that’s true, but let’s say it is. Which of these four is the most plausible implication:

a. The disease started in Italy and then spread to China.

b. The Italian government knew about these cases in September 2019, but covered them up.

c. The Chinese government covered up the fact that Covid-19 was circulating in China well before September 2019, and decided to take no action to slow the spread because . . . because . . . because . . . well because they welcomed having a disastrous pandemic and didn’t want to take any action to prevent Wuhan from being devastated in January. But once Wuhan was hit hard in January, they did take very aggressive actions to prevent the spread to other parts of China.

d. Borat is to blame.

So the Daily Mail thinks answer C is the most plausible.

Me? I’m not even convinced the story is true. But if it is true then we really have no idea where the virus came from. It could have come from Kazakhstan for all I know. Or China. Or Italy. Or the Congo.

If the story is true, then there are lots of other things we know to be true that no longer make any sense, such as that there were almost no deaths in China until January. And if you don’t trust Chinese data, look at Melbourne, or some other similar example. The caseloads grow exponentially. So if the Italian story is true then this suggests that the people who had Covid-19 in September 2019 had a different form of the virus, either less fatal or less contagious. Perhaps the virus mutated. Who knows?

Again, I don’t believe or disbelieve the story. I’d like a second opinion from someone less biased than the Daily Mail.

This post is not about Covid; it’s about bigotry. The Italian story provides zero evidence of a Chinese cover-up.

A number of newspapers in the Tribune syndicate have printed my new piece on Biden’s path forward. In the article, I mess with progressives by quoting Keynes:

“(The) NRA, which is essentially reform and probably impedes recovery, has been put across too hastily, in the false guise of being part of the technique of recovery.” . . .

Of course, many progressives will not be pleased with my suggestion to prioritize recovery over reform. But as Keynes pointed out in his 1933 letter, a strong economy is the best way to create the political capital required to pursue a reform agenda:

“It will be through raising high the prestige of your administration by success in short-range recovery that you will have the driving force to accomplish long-range reform.”

David Beckworth has a set of tweets discussing the Fed’s new average inflation targeting policy. Richard Clarida points out that it’s basically Bernanke’s temporary PLT, which starts from the date when you first hit the zero bound. This is essentially what I said right from the beginning. So either the Fed succeeds in getting inflation to average 2% or we have zero rates for ever, as in Japan. I’d guess that they achieve 2% (on average) by 2030.

David also points to a Jim Bullard speech that says AIT is sort of like NGDPLT:

PS. Did I ever show you my license plate? 🙂 🙂 🙂

I have a crazy radical idea that I’d like to propose, but first you might want to sit down.

A couple weeks ago we had a presidential election. My idea is that we should actually count the millions of votes from all over the country that have not yet been counted.

It’s just a thought. BTW, there are still 14 House races that have not yet been decided.

Here’s a recent Nate Silver tweet:

Slow vote counts fuel conspiracy theories.

On another subject, the GOP has two interesting claims about the recent election.

1. There was massive vote fraud favoring Biden in heavily black and Hispanic cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. This explains why Biden did so well in those cities.

2. Trump did better than usual (for a Republican) in black and Hispanic areas, which proves that Trump is not a racist.

Take your pick.

Off topic; this caught my eye:

Once again, it’s not health vs. the economy. It’s success vs. failure.

Calm down, I don’t think the GOP committed any election fraud. Instead, I’m going to show that if you were going to look at the data and draw inferences about possible fraud, there’d be all sorts of red flags pointing right at the GOP.

Let’s start with the basics. AFAIK everyone admits that fraud is likely to be concentrated in swing states, where moving 100,000 votes might tip a close election. The wide national vote margin, which will likely be around 7 million in favor of Biden, has nothing to do with fraud.

So to look for evidence of fraud you’d look for swing states where Trump did suspiciously well given the fact that he lost the national vote by a huge margin.

The last estimate I saw from Nate Silver is that Biden will win the national vote by 4.6%, and he’s winning the tipping point state (Wisconsin) by 0.6%. That means Trump is outperforming by an astounding 4% in the tipping point state, a huge gap unlike anything I’ve ever seen. (Even the last election saw an unprecedented gap, but it was more like 2.9%. And in 2012, Obama won the tipping point state by 5.4%, even as he won the election by only 3.9%)

Trump is perhaps the luckiest presidential candidate in US history, massively outperforming his national margin in all the key swing states. That’s really, really, really suspicious!

Of course I don’t actually believe that Trump tried to steal the election, because all the experts (including Republican experts like Karl Rove) say it’s virtually impossible to steal an election when the swing states are being won by tens of thousands of votes. Even stealing one of those states would be almost impossible. Three would be almost impossible to the third power. There’s really no point in even trying to steal an election.

I frequently see election fraud claims based on what the Trumpistas view as “fishy election data”. I cannot emphasize enough that all of these claims are false. Whether it be false claims that lots of people only voted for Biden and not for someone else, or false claims of suspicious margins in big Democratic cities, or false claims of a suspiciously high turnout in states like Wisconsin, it’s all lies. I’ve chased every claim down the rabbit hole and they’ve all been lies.

If you actually wished to look for suspicious patterns in the data, the evidence would point overwhelmingly at the GOP, not the Dems. Given Biden’s 7 million vote margin, it’s insane how close Trump came to winning last week’s election. It really does look like the GOP cheated, padding vote totals in swing states, if suspicious election data is your criterion.

Over at Econlog I pointed out how “weird” it is that there’s a high correlation between favoring a losing candidate and believing election fraud took place. One is a normative judgement and one is positive. Why any correlation at all? It’s not rational. In a logical world, the Dems would be the ones screaming about election fraud.

PS. BTW, can we count the &%$*@&$ votes! There are still many millions of votes yet to be counted. The media is full of stories based on “vote margins” which will change once all the votes are counted. It’s been ten days since the election and vote counting is not speeding up; indeed it’s slowing down more and more each day. What’s the problem? If all the votes had been counted within 24 hours, it would have been immediately clear that Biden had won the national vote by a comfortable margin and won the EC by at least three sizable states.

Update: I just realized that Biden will win the EC by 306 to 232, the exact same “landslide” that Trump claimed in 2016. In addition, Trump has implicitly acknowledged that he lost the election, with all his tweets about control of the Senate hanging in the balance in Georgia. So that means Trump now thinks he lost the 2020 election by a landslide.

This story caught my eye:

During a Pennsylvania court hearing this week on one of the many election lawsuits brought by President Donald Trump, a judge asked a campaign lawyer whether he had found any signs of fraud from among the 592 ballots challenged.

The answer was no.

Bryan Caplan says that a good way to ascertain whether people are sincere in their claims (rather than just bullshitting) is to bet them on the issue at stake. Most people won’t be willing to put money on the line for something they don’t truly believe.

Lawyers caught lying in court can face some pretty severe penalties, so Trump’s lawyers have a strong incentive not to lie about claims of electoral fraud. Thus it’s likely that Trump’s lawyers are telling the truth when they say they have no evidence of fraud.

PS. And now even Fox News is a part of the anti-Trump conspiracy. Sad!