Slate Star Codex

Brilliant, Must Read of the Day – ‘You Are Still Crying Wolf’

by

Scott Alexander has just penned what is perhaps the most brilliant, and important, post-election article I have read. It’s titled, You Are Still Crying Wolf, and here are the first few paragraphs:

[Content warning: hate crimes, Trump, racism. I have turned off comments to keep out bad people who might be attracted by this sort of thing. Avoid sharing in places where this will attract the wrong kind of attention, as per your best judgment. Please don’t interpret anything in this article to mean that Trump is not super terrible]

[Epistemic status: A reduction of a complicated issue to only 8000 words, because nobody would read it if it were longer. I think this is true but incomplete. I will try to discuss missing parts at more length later.]

I.

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source).

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-1-13-45-pm

Trump made gains among blacks. He made big among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

The FDA is Partly to Blame for Mylan’s EpiPen Price Gouging

by

Screen Shot 2016-08-30 at 11.09.18 AM

The new head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) selected by President Barack Obama has very close ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Robert Califf, an FDA deputy commissioner and cardiologist at Duke University, has had considerable dealings, including financial ones, with drug manufacturers, whose products must be approved by the agency he’s been tabbed to lead.

“No one who knows him thinks he wants to weaken the regulatory agency he has been chosen to lead,” The New York Times reported. “But he has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory, and some public health advocates question whether his background could tilt him in the direction of an industry he would be in charge of supervising.”

Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard political science professor, told the Times: “In a sense, he’s the ultimate industry insider.”

– From last year’s post: Obama’s Nominee to Head the FDA Has Very Deep Ties to the Pharmaceutical Industry

In the past 24 hours, I’ve read two very interesting articles detailing how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is partly to blame when it comes to not just EpiPen price gouging, but drug price gouging in general.

The first piece is by someone whose work I’ve highlighted multiple times in the past, David Dayen. Let’s take a look at some of his observations in a recent piece titled, Here’s How to Stop Price Gouging by Drugmakers Like Mylan:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.