By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 15, 2020)
There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.
Jerry Seinfeld
Whether comedian Jerry Seinfeld knew it or not, his quote on attention spans was touching one of the ongoing controversies in psychology and marketing science: Are people’s attention spans shrinking?
On the affirmative side is recent research by European researchers Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Bjarke Mørch Mønsted, Philipp Hövel and Sune Lehmann who found that “the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.”
Put more simply, in the era of social media and hyper-reactive media content, more competition for people’s finite brainspace is leading to people spending less time watching, reading and listening to specific topics.
If these researchers were to answer Seinfeld’s contention that people’s attention span expands to fit the quality (or novelty) of the content, they might reply: Yes, except that attention spans are actually bounded by time (i.e., we only have our lifetimes to consume content) and biology (i.e., its hard to listen to two people talking at the same time); and, in the internet-era, the increased competition for people’s attention has created more quality (or novel) content that attracts this attention.
In other words, higher quantities of compelling content is increasingly dividing up the finite pie of people’s attention into smaller segments.
So, perhaps, its not people’s attention span that has changed but, rather, the quantity of good content?
Research countering the ‘shrinking attention span’ argument was animated by this question: How is that people can’t pay attention during a 1-hour business meeting but can willingly do a 6-hour binge watch of Game of Thrones or Supergirl?
Using public opinion survey data, researchers at Prezi, a business presentation software company, and Kelton Research, a consumer research company, found in a 2018 study that attention spans are actually improving over time, not decreasing, and that people are, instead, more selective about the content they consume.
“Respondents claimed their ability to maintain focus has actually improved over time, despite an ever-growing mountain of available content,” argue the Prezi and Kelton Research report authors. “And it makes sense if you think about it: many of us have become more selective about what we give our attention to, bookmark things to return to when nothing else piques our interest, and often prefer to wait for good content to find us rather than seek it out ourselves.”
In a more academic rebuttal to the ‘shrinking attention span’ argument, Dr. Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University (Milton Keynes, UK), contends that attention span is task-dependent. “How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is,” says Dr. Briggs.
According to Dr. Briggs, its not declining attention spans driving down our attention to specific topics, its that content providers are better at grabbing our attention. [This could also explain why I’m on my third marriage.]
Declining media and public interest in the coronavirus pandemic
The current coronavirus pandemic is stark evidence at how hard it is to keep people’s attention.
Imagine a global crisis spanning over six months in which eight million people are directly impacted and nearly a half million people perish from its effects. Add to that the billions of people indirectly affected by its economic consequences. That should grab everyone’s attention, right?
Yes, it did. And then some.
Coverage of the coronavirus pandemic flourished within U.S. cable TV news and on internet news sites from late-February to late-May (see Figures 1 and 2, respectively), peaking in mid-March when most U.S. states issued lockdown orders to combat the virus’ spread, but declining steadily thereafter until late-May when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis, Minnesota police officers quickly rose to the top of the news agenda (see Figure 3).
Figure 1: U.S. Cable TV news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
But those three graphs represent the news media’s attention. What about the public’s attention?
Google Trends tracks how often people Google-search on a specific topic and therefore is often used by researchers as a proxy for public interest. Figure 4 shows five search terms and the relative frequency each has been searched since January 1st.
Figure 4: Google searches on coronavirus, weather, COVID-19, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter from January 1 to June 14, 2020.
Like the news coverage, the public’s interest in the coronavirus/COVID-19 peaked in mid-March with the first statewide lockdowns and has been in a steady decline since then, being matched by searches on ‘weather’ after May 21st and by the combined searches on George Floyd and Black Lives Matter from May 27th to June 6th.
Part of that decline in searches on ‘coronavirus’ could reflect people using Google as a basic education source, not just a news source. Once people acquire sufficient information on a topic, their use of Google’s search engine on the topic may also decline. Perhaps this apparent decline in interest is not as substantial as it looks in Google Trends.
However, research as shown Google search frequency is a useful indicator of public interest and relatively accurate predictive tool. For example, Google searches for upcoming movies, political candidates and specific vehicle brands and models are predictive of movie box office receipts, candidate vote shares and vehicle sales.
Assuming, therefore, that this decline in public interest in the coronavirus is genuine, what has caused it?
Possible Reason #1: People have shorter attention spans
Possible Reason #2: More compelling events (e.g., the 2020 Election, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter) have replaced the pandemic in people’s minds
I’ve already discussed these two possible explanations in the above discussion about attention spans and the importance of compelling content in keeping people engaged.
These potential reasons are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both could be factors in the coronavirus interest decline.
But there are other possible causal factors to consider…
Possible Reason #3: Public interest follows the news media’s interest
Insight is gained when Google-search data on the coronavirus is overlaid with the cable TV news data (see Figures 1 and 4 above). The two data series track closely together, with a Granger causality test indicating changes in cable TV news coverage are more predictive of changes in public interest (Google-search behavior) than the other way around.
In fact, there is a large amount of media and public agenda-setting research linking changes in public attitudes and beliefs to changes in media coverage (and vice versa).
In their meta-analysis of the news media’s public agenda-setting effects from 1972 to 2015, Yunjuan Luo, Hansel Burley, Alexander Moe, and Mingxiao Sui found a “consistency in findings across agenda-setting studies and the presence of strong news media’s public agenda-setting effects.”
Therefore, it is reasonable to conjecture that one possible cause of the U.S. public losing interest in the coronavirus is its declining priority within the news media.
Possible Reason #4: The coronavirus pandemic is in decline
Could the objective decline in the coronavirus pandemic explain the falling interest by both the news media and the public?
This possible reason seems implausible to me.
While the U.S. is off its pandemic peaks, the number of daily new U.S. cases has only fallen 30 percent from its high on April 24th (see Figure 5) and 23 U.S. states are still experiencing increasing infection rates. Meanwhile, worldwide, the coronavirus pandemic is still growing, particularly in countries in South and Central America where a significant percentage of Americans were born or have family still living there (see Figure 6).
Figure 5: U.S.New Daily Coronavirus Cases (Jan. 22 to June 14, 2020)
Figure 6: Worldwide New Daily Coronavirus Cases (Jan. 22 to June 14, 2020)
To my eyes, the coronavirus pandemic has not declined anywhere near the magnitude of the decline in interest. It could be a contributing factor, but it doesn’t seem likely that this is the primary cause.
Possible Reason #5: Americans are weary of negative news
In a November 2019 survey of more than 12,000 U.S. adults, Pew Research documented a high level of ‘negative news fatigue’ by Americans.
“About two-thirds of Americans (66%) feel worn out by the amount of news there is, while far fewer (32%) say they like the amount of news they are getting,” says senior researcher Jeffrey Gottfried. “Americans’ exhaustion with the news hasn’t changed since early 2018 — the last time the (Pew) Center asked this question — when 68% felt worn out. And in a similar question asked several months before the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, nearly six-in-ten (59%) felt worn out by the amount of coverage of the campaign and candidates.”
It is certainly plausible that the profoundly negative, life-threatening aspects of the pandemic has made it a tough topic for Americans to sustain their unbroken attention.
Sometimes you just need to look away.
The coronavirus pandemic has produced an unprecedented level of public interest, even if that interest has since softened
Google searches on thecoronavirus reached unprecedented levels in the U.S. and across the globe in March and April.
Figure 7 shows Google search trends in the U.S. from January 1st to June 15th for the term ‘coronavirus’ in comparison to other common search terms: weather, Trump, Amazon, movie.
Figure 8, in turn, shows Google search trends since 2004 for the U.S. presidents and the Iraq War.
Figure 7: Comparing Google searches on the ‘coronavirus’ to other common search terms
The coronavirus towers over everyone and everything else. So much so that the effectiveness of online advertising significantly changed soon after the pandemic became the dominant U.S. news story.
One of the most important measures in website analytics and digital advertising is the conversion rate— which is the proportion of website visitors who take action beyond simply viewing its content, such as clicking on a banner ad or responding to a direct request from a content creator.
According to digital advertising expert Mark Irvine, after it was clear in mid-March that COVID-19 was a massive epidemic in the U.S., conversion rates dropped by an average of 21 percent in just three weeks.
So, yes, interest has waned since the peak in April, but it is still relatively high compared to terms that are typically in the Top 10 of Google searches on an average day.
Even so, the declining Google-search interest in the coronavirus since March is significant and sustained and matched by a similar decline in the news media.
Understanding why this has occurred despite the ongoing nature of the crisis — and at such a fast rate nonetheless — should be fertile ground for research far into the future.
Final thoughts
I left one possible explanation for this coronavirus interest decline out of the above discussion, in part, because it is more of a corollary to Possible Reason #3 (Public interest follows media interest). There is no question that the world economy has contracted due to the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. is now officially in a recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Thus, there is an economic incentive for economic and incumbent political elites to desire moving past this worldwide health crisis. To dwell on it longer than necessary can only hurt the economy further.
Is it possible economic or political elites have actively seeded the news media — particularly the corporate-controlled news media (Is there any other kind in the U.S.?) — with stories and agendas designed to cast attention away from the coronavirus pandemic?
I do not possess any evidence to suggest this has happened, but I won’t rule it out.
K.R.K.
Send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 12, 2020)
I’ll rip my ear hairs out if I read one more article about how islands have been so effective at controlling COVID-19.
New Zealand, Hawaii, Iceland, Singapore and South Korea (which is effectively an island given its infrequently crossed land border with North Korea) did a great job defeating COVID-19.
So, if I understand the lesson, when the next pandemic hits, policy step number one is to live on an island.
Got it.
For the rest of us, we need real information on how to defend against the coronavirus and its genetic cousins to follow.
Unfortunately, the U.S. mainstream media deals only in canned narratives when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic — its either: (1) the Republicans are a bunch of anti-lockdown, anti-science bumpkins who put their 401ks ahead of human lives, or (2) the Democrats are fear-mongering proglodytes using the pandemic to advance the oppressive power of their postmodern Menshevik state.
What these two narratives miss is reality, even as some aspects within each are true — which is precisely why both are seductive and dangerous.
They can’t tell you the truth because, frankly, it wouldn’t attract an audience in today’s hyper-partisan landscape. The ongoing rampage of the Mean Orange Man is one (perhaps only) reason The New York Times and CNN are profitable in today’s over-crowded, highly-competitive entertainment milieu. On the other side of the dung heap, coverage of the existential threat of leftofascists to our God-endorsed democracy and Jesus’ two-thousand-year reign on Earth has been Fox News’ golden goose for over 20 years now. They aren’t going to change their news chyron because I believe objective, non-partisan journalism has an audience.
Given the narrow motivations of today’s news media, why wouldn’t their news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic be full dramatic but marginally relevant info-twaddle?
At this point, most of the American news audience is too conditioned to accept anything else.
The Great Convergence
But there is one feature of the coronavirus in the U.S. that has received sparse attention, even though it may represent the most important characteristic of the virus’ spread within the country.
The biggest story of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. may be that its daily rate of spread is converging across all 50 states (and the District of Columbia), with little regard for the specific state-level policies implemented to suppress and mitigate its advance.
In other words, most of the states will eventually catch up with New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts in terms of cases and deaths per capita (after adjusting for population density).
New York, New Jersey , Connecticut and Massachusetts took a devastating hit from the coronavirus early despite implementing some of the strictest lockdown measures in the country, suggesting that the virus was already distributed through those populations before the lockdowns. While states such as Florida, Georgia, Texas and California have benefited from a much slower (“flatter”) spread of the virus despite implementing their lockdowns late (California being an important exception).
The good news for New York and the other densely-populated Northeast Atlantic states is that the virus may have already passed through their most vulnerable populations. The bad news for California and the other warm, lower latitude states may be that this has not yet happened.
Of course, these relationships are subject to change as this pandemic progresses.
Convergence is inevitable, but how each state gets there isn’t
At first glance, the chart’s most striking feature is New York’s dramatic rise in coronavirus cases from mid-March to mid-April (and dramatic fall in new cases thereafter). Equally interesting (to me at least) is the relatively slow climb for the other seven large U.S. states — which is probably a function of the population density of states along the northeast Atlantic corridor.
Figure 1: Number of daily new COVID-19 cases per 100k people for the 8 most populous U.S. states (through June 10, 2020)
However, another takeaway from Figure 1 is the convergence of the new COVID-19 case rates over time. At the end of April, the average number of new cases per day for every 100K people ranged from 2.3 (Florida) to 24.1 (New York). By June 10th, the average number of new cases per day for every 100K people ranged from 2.8 (Ohio) to 6.3 (Illinois).
You don’t need to be a statistician or an epidemiologist to see that new case rates have become more the same than different since the start of this health crisis.
Yes, there are still substantive state-level differences which can (and will) have a meaningful impact on the final coronavirus case and death rates. And variations in public policies in response to this health crisis likely will be needed to explain those outcome differences. And it is also critical to note that California, Florida, Georgia and Texas are still at or near their peak in daily new COVID-19 cases.
This health crisis is far from over.
In the larger scheme of things, despite substantively divergent coronavirus policies across the eight states in Figure 1 (Florida, Georgia and Texas being regularly chastised in the media for not being more aggressive in stopping the virus), all eight states are becoming more alike than different over time.
I call it the Great Convergence.
Isn’t that convergence inevitable — and therefore uninteresting — given that all the 50 states (plus D.C.) will reach zero new cases-per-day at some point?
Yes, in the long run, all the states will converge towards zero new cases per day. But how states get there is important. Specifically, how many people will die by the time the states stop registering new cases?
However, there is evidence that the states are becoming more homogeneous over time in COVID-19 case and death rates. While few states will ever match New York’s approximately 1,600 COVID-19 deaths (per 1 million people), Figure 2 shows that the standard deviations across states in their case and death rates have been going down since April 1st.
Figure 2: The Slow Decline of Standard Deviations in State’s COVID-19 Case and Death Rates
Considering the percentage of coronavirus news coverage dedicated to promoting (or dismissing, if you are Fox News) the aggressive lockdown policies recommended by most epidemiologists and public health experts, heretofore, those mitigation measures have not repaid the effort, particularly in terms of COVID-19 deaths per capita.
Some final thoughts
Remember the “flatten the curve” graph (Figure 3) often shown in the media at the beginning of the pandemic?
Figure 3: “Flattening the Curve”
Epidemiologists generally agree that the value of virus protective measures (e.g., lockdowns, social distancing) is to distribute the number of new cases more evenly over time, thereby putting less pressure on the healthcare system and saving lives. “Flattening the curve” also gives researchers more time to develop effective treatments and vaccines.
Recall Figure 1 (above) where New York’s distribution of new cases over time looks much more like the “without protective measures” curve in Figure 3, while the other seven states have much flatter curves. California and New York were two of the first states to issue statewide lockdown orders (March 19th and 20th, respectively); yet, New York’s new case curve has a much higher, more narrowly-shaped peak, while California’s is much flatter. More importantly, California’s COVID-19 death rate per capita is significantly lower than New York’s (128 deaths per 1 million people versus New York’s 1,587).
What happened? Why were epidemiologists accurate for California, but not so much for New York? Three possible (and preliminary) explanations include: (a) the coronavirus prevalent on the U.S. East Coast may have been more contagious and lethalthan the version prevalent on the West Coast, (b) the virus was embedded earlier and deeper on the East Coast than previously thought, and (c) the population densities on the East Coast were more favorable for hosting and spreading the coronavirus.
But even if those disadvantages faced by New York are true, California’s case and death rates may yet approach New York’s when this pandemic is finally over.
Similarly, the current surge in new coronavirus cases in states that had previously lagged in its growth (e.g., Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas) may be less a function of poor policy responses by those states and more the result of their advantages over the Northeast Atlantic states as well as the characteristics of the virus itself.
As we often are reminded during this pandemic, the coronavirus is more in charge than politicians and experts care to admit.
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 11, 2020)
“More than a dozen states and Puerto Rico are recording their highest seven-day average of new cases since the pandemic began, hospitalizations in at least nine states have been on the rise since Memorial Day,” says The Washington Post. “In Texas, North and South Carolina, California, Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Arizona, there are an increasing number of patients under supervised care since the holiday weekend because of covid-19 infections.”
“While the recent mass protests could exacerbate its spread, the incubation period of the (corona)virus means this latest rise in cases can more likely be traced to a loosening of lockdown restrictions around Memorial Day weekend late last month,” writes The Guardian’s Tim Walker.
Given the evidence — both in terms of new cases and hospitalizations — its an easy conclusion to draw.
Unfortunately, most news accounts of the recent rise of coronavirus cases in some (mostly southern) U.S. states misses the bigger story.
Figure 1: New COVID-19 cases in U.S. Coastal States (7-day moving average)
Data source: Johns Hopkins University (CSSE); Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
In terms of sheer numbers, California, Florida and Texas have experienced the largest increases in daily new COVID-19 cases since the Memorial Day weekend (May 23–25). As of June 9th, California’s 7-day moving average of new cases each day is around 2,750 — its highest levels ever.
Likewise, Texas is at an all-time high at around 1,500 new cases each day (7-day moving average) and Florida is near its all-time high at 1,250 per day (7-day moving average).
However, a serious question remains as to precisely why these states (including other states such as North Carolina and South Carolina) are witnessing new highs but not others.
The easy suspect is the loosening of lockdown policies across the country, especially in Southern states where the summer vacation season is in full-swing.
Ballotpedia offers a summary of the lockdown policies for all 50 states (plus D.C.). Using their data, combined with the John Hopkins coronavirus data, I break out the 7-day moving average trends in new coronavirus cases for states in each of three lockdown categories: (1) states that continue to have a statewide lockdown in place, (2) states that began to loosen their lockdown policies after the start of the Memorial Day weekend (May 23 to 25), and (3) states that began to loosen lockdown restrictions before the Memorial Day weekend.
Figure 2 shows the trends for all three lockdown categories.
Figure 2: Comparing New COVID-19 cases by Lockdown Categories (7-day moving average)
Data source: Johns Hopkins University (CSSE); Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
Looking at the total U.S. trend in Figure 1, there has been a clear downward movement in new coronavirus cases since the first week of April. However, there is a small upward bump occurring soon after the Memorial Day weekend and before any possible impact by the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, which began on May 26th (in Minneapolis) and increased steadily across the country through the first week of June.
That is evidence of a modest Memorial Day effect.
[Note:A large spike of 5,500 new coronavirus cases in Michigan on June 5th appears to be the function of a backlog in test results and not an actual spike in new cases in and around that day. Removing this spike does not significantly change the nominal shape of the U.S. totals in Figure 1.]
More interesting than the total U.S. trends, however, are the changes for the three lockdown categories.
For the six states that have not significantly loosened their lockdowns (California, Kentucky, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York and Oregon), the trend in new cases has been consistently downward since early April — though, this encouraging trend has plateaued since mid-May.
For the 10 states that began opening up for normal business after May 23rd (Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington), the downward trend in new cases did not begin until early May, but has continued consistently since.
Finally, those 27 states that began easing restrictions before May 23rd, the evidence is mixed. On one hand, there has been no sustained rend up or down in new COVID-19 cases since early April. However, these states appear to be the drivers behind the U.S. total uptick in new COVID-19 cases after Memorial Day, suggesting some of the states in this group are the likely culprits behind the national increase.
But what states and why?
Figure 3 breaks out the 50 states (and D.C.) by whether or not they are Coastal states within the warmer half of the country (i.e., states entirely or partially below 40° latitude; shown in Figure 1).
We have found the malefactors responsible for recent increases in coronavirus cases and it is not based solely on a state having loosened their lockdown restrictions. There are states that loosened their lockdowns before May 23rd and yet have not experienced a significant rise in COVID-19 cases (Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wyoming).
Something else is driving up coronavirus cases and I believe Figure 3 has found the prime suspect: warm, sunny beaches where documentary evidence has shown in the past few weeks that beach goers are not routinely practicing sound social distancing methods (e.g., facial masks and 6-ft personal spaces).
Figure 3: Comparing New COVID-19 cases in U.S. Overall and Coastal States (7-day moving average)
Data source: Johns Hopkins University (CSSE); Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
“We expected 50/50,” said one Ocean City, MD beach visitor about the prevalence of facial masks during the Memorial Day weekend. “But this is like 10 percent, maybe.”
Similar accounts have been reported on beaches throughout the country since the first warm days of April.
As seen in Figure 3, Coastal states (which include California, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas) have seen their COVID-19 cases rise persistently since mid-April — the peak of the spring break beach crowds and the start of the regular vacation season.
There are exceptions to this rule: (1) Lousiana has not seen a large rise in new cases (but neither is Louisiana a prime beach location), (2) New Jersey (where I live) saw its beaches begin to fill in late May and, yet, has not witnessed a surge in new COVID-19 cases, and (3) Arizona — which has experienced a large increase in new COVID-19 cases since Memorial Day — has no apparent ocean beaches.
Yet, the data is showing a strong connection between warm Coastal beach states and the recent spike in new COVID-19 cases.
Far more people will go to the beach this weekend than march in protests. In a typical year, 64 percent of Americans spend at least one summer weekend away from home and the most frequent destination is a beach (or about 13 million people during each of the summer weekends). From 2016 to 2018, only one-in-five Americans participated in at least one protest — a time period which includes the Women’s Marches around Donald Trump’s inauguration — and the recent mass protests for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter (BLM), while likely larger and more widespread, probably has not exceed 10 million in total (based on my analysis of the recent BLM marches listed here).
None of the findings here suggests mass protests can’t spread the coronavirus or that states where lockdown restrictions have loosened too fast or recklessly won’t experience a spike in new cases. Both are likely sources of some of the newest COVID-19 cases.
Still, the evidence is stronger that recent increases of COVID-19 in the U.S. are a function of the specific social distancing behaviors of Americans (or lack thereof) when they are relaxing along our nation’s many warm beaches.
To anyone I might see on one of the New Jersey beaches this weekend: Please wear masks and keep your distance from me and my family. No offense intended.
K.R.K.
The dataset and statistical code used for this analysis can be requested at: kroeger98@yahoo.com
Sixty deaths in one day for L.A. County is a significant increase at a time when California had been looking like they had turned the corner on the coronavirus. [California averaged about 60 deaths-a-day statewide over the past week.]
Like many observers, I believe California Governor Gavin Newsom has done one of the more commendable jobs in handling this health crisis, and he has done so with very little partisan grandstanding and preening for the news cameras.
However, I am generally forgiving of Gov. Cuomo given the sheer scale of tragedy his state has faced during this pandemic. At around 1,580 COVID-19 deaths per 1 million people, New York’s death rate far surpasses the state with the second highest death rate, New Jersey, at around 1,360 deaths per 1 million people.
In comparison, California’s COVID-19 per capita death rate is currently around 115 per 1 million people. While the gap in death rates between New York and California is wide, the news that California is not experiencing the steady decline in COVID-19 cases or deaths as is happening in New York led me to wonder: How bad would things need to get in California in order to for that state to compare to New York’s horrific COVID-19 per capita death rate?
I thought the answer would be easy to determine: Calculate how many deaths would be necessary to match New York’s 1,580 per-million. In California’s case, with 39.5 million citizens compared to New York’s 19.5 million, that would be about 61,000 COVID-19 deaths. As of June 6th, California had only 4,558 deaths.
Yet, I knew even as I did that napkin calculation, it wasn’t fair to New York which is much more densely populated than California (419 persons per sq. mile versus 251 persons per sq. mile, respectively) — and population density is likely a major factor in explaining variations in state-level COVID-19 cases and deaths.
I needed to adjust for a state’s population density before I tried to compare its pandemic performance relative to New York. States less densely populated than New York have a clear advantage in controlling the coronavirus and to compare their numbers to New York’s without such an adjustment would be unjust.
So, I added an additional step to the analysis by estimating a state-level linear model of COVID-19 deaths (per-million) with a state’s population density as the lone independent variable.
[Note:I also tested a variable measuring the number of days since a state first reported COVID-19 case, as it seems plausible the time a state has been dealing with the virus might be related to its relative number of deaths. However, this variable was found to be significant and was therefore excluded.]
Using the estimated parameters from the simple linear model, I determined New York’s population density disadvantage/disadvantage relative to each of the other states and D.C.
[Note:The most densely populated state-like jurisdiction is Washington, D.C. at 10,298 per sq. mile; and the most densely populated state is New Jersey at 1,208 per sq. mile].
From there I adjusted the number of additional COVID-19 deaths each state would need to have a comparable per capita death rate to New York’s, as well as the number of days it would take each state to reach that number given their current number of deaths per day (7-day moving average from May 31 — June 6).
For example, in the case of California where the napkin calculation said the state needed about 61,000 COVID-19 deaths to equal New York’s per capita rate, after adjusting for California’s population density advantage that number fell to 47,093 (i.e., 4,558 + 42,535 = 47,093; see columns 2 and 9 for California in Figure 1 below).
In Figure 1, we see the states where it would take the longest to reach the New York COVID-19 per capita death rate. In the cases of Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont that have not experienced a COVID-19 death in the past 7 days, this measure is essentially infinity. Nonetheless, Alaska would need to add 44 deaths to its current 10, Vermont would need to add 317 to its current 55, and Hawaii would need to add 1,566 deaths to its current 17.
It is unlikely any of those three states will reach New York’s relative death total (though not impossible).
However, there are other states where it would take at least 600 days to match the coronavirus’ lethality in New York. Those states notably include: California, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas — all of which continue to experience a relatively high number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths each day. Still, it would take California 644 days at its present pace to parallel New York’s per capita death rate.
Figure 1: U.S. states unlikely to surpass New York’s COVID-19 per capita death rate
California is not likely to ever reach New York’s relative numbers, but what states might still?
Figure 2 reveals the states needing the fewest days at their current pace to surpass New York’s death rate: Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota and Mississippi (at 30, 37, 60 and 73, respectively.
Figure 2: U.S. states that could potentially surpass New York’s COVID-19 death rate
[Note:The remaining U.S. states not listed in Figures 1 and 2 can be found in the Appendix at the end of this essay.]
It is important to remind ourselves that the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. is still ongoing and only in its first wave. According to experts, there could be additional coronavirus waves as states loosen their lockdown policies and until a vaccine is widely available.
Despite that unpleasant fact looming over us, most states are probably not going to approach New York’s per capita death rate, even with additional outbreak waves — which begs another important question: What went wrong in New York and (to slightly lesser extents) in other East Coast states such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut?
All were among the earliest to institute statewide lockdowns and the governors in each of those states have generally received praise in the national and local media for their leadership during the pandemic.
Was the virus on the East Coast more dangerous than the virus in other parts of the country? There is already some evidence already suggesting that possibility.
We must also consider that using state-level data (just 51 data points) is too crude a measure to fully understand variations in per capita death rates within states. For example, New York City is primarily responsible for driving up New York’s per capita death rate — which is understandable given its population density of 26,400 per sq. mile.
If we treat New York City as separate from the rest of the state, New York’s overall performance may be quite explainable and not as much of an outlier.
It is still too early to draw strong conclusions about how each state governor has performed during this crisis. What one New York Daily News Letter to the Editor called Governor Cuomo’s pandemic failure may, in truth, be one of this pandemic’s success stories. According to researchers at Columbia University, had Governor Cuomo acted slower in locking down the state, things would have been much worse. Conversely, had he locked down the state sooner — by even a week — many lives possibly could have been saved.
Such conclusions, even based on solid data and modeling methods, are still more theoretic than practical.
As yet, little is yet known about whether broad, statewide lockdowns are more effective than simply practicing strict social distancing techniques — as both were typically implemented simultaneously.
The U.S. and Europe right now are inadvertently running broad social experiments as they loosen their lockdown orders and also when people gather in large numbers for protests. Is it social distancing or ‘stay-at-home’-type lockdowns that are most helping to control the spread of the coronavirus.
When this pandemic ultimately ends and as the data are fully analyzed — including from other parts of the world — we will know more than at any other point in history about how to limit the damage (human and economic) from the next viral pandemic.
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 5, 2020)
Defending in April her decision not to issue a statewide, mandatory ‘stay-at-home’ order, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R) said, “We have a role and obligation from our farmers, to our processors, to our supply chain to continue to feed the world and keep food on the plate.”
Iowa produces 10 percent of the nation’s food supply.
“Our goal, of course, is to get Texas back to work,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) said in late April as his state slowly rolled back its ‘stay-at-home’ order.
And its not just states with Republican governors feeling the pressure to re-open their economies during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, California has witnessed some of the largest protests to get the state’s economy up and going.
Oceanside, California city councilman Christopher Rodriguez, a Republican, told a protest crowd gathered in mid-May that his mother had taught him, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”
Popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been one of the most vocal critics of the California statewide lockdown and — with his 4.6 million subscribers — is taken seriously among California politicians.
“How are you supposed to make money?” asked Rogan during a recent podcast, who chides those politicians who are asking people to “snitch” on businesses that open during the statewide lockdown but say little about staying healthy.
“This is bad government. There’s zero effort talking about giving people information on how to strengthen your immune system. Zero. Or talking to people about lowering stress. Zero on the importance of keeping your body healthy…It’s crazy.”
Facing pressure to re-open the state economy, California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the first governors to issue lockdown orders, has also been among the most active governors in putting forth a plan to safely reopen the state economy.
“Many of the strengths of the California economy — its role as a hub for commerce, tourism and education in the Pacific Rim — have become liabilities during the pandemic-induced recession,” conclude Tim Arango and Thomas Fuller, who have covered the coronavirus pandemic in California for The New York Times.
It has been under these legitimate economic pressures that recent upticks in new COVID-19 cases in some states force an equally legitimate question: “Are some governors, particularly Republicans governors, opening up their economies too fast?”
Figure 1 shows the 20 U.S. states with highest number of new daily COVID-19 cases relative to their peak number (7-day moving averages are used to smooth out random day-to-day variations).
Figure 1: 20 U.S. States with highest number of new daily COVID-19 cases relative to their peak number
As of June 3rd, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and California were at their peaks in daily new cases and, among the 10 states at (or near) their new cases peak, nine are led by Republican governors.
But notice also that nine of those states struggling with bringing their number of new cases down are also Atlantic or Gulf coastal states, and are among the states with the highest percentage of their GDP connected to trade with China.
Hold your comments for a moment. I am not suggesting China is somehow directly involved in keeping the number of new COVID-19 cases high in these states. But, it is possible the economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic have been hardest on those states heavily dependent on trade with China. Subsequently, those states might be among the first to try and re-open their economies before it is prudent.
If we examine those 20 states that are at (or near) their minimum number of new daily COVID-19 cases relative to their peaks, an opposite pattern emerges for the partisanship of governors, the state’s connection with Chinese trade, and proximity to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
Figure 2: 20 U.S. States with lowest number of new daily COVID-19 cases relative to their peak number
Among the top 10 states in the relative number of new daily cases, only three are led by Republican governors (Idaho, Vermont, Wyoming), three are in the Top 15 for trade with China (Idaho, Louisiana, New Jersey) and only one is an Atlantic/Gulf coast state (Louisiana).
So, what is causing those states to have problems bringing down their number of new cases? Is it those Republican governors? All that beach and water that makes people want to leave their safe homes? Or is it the heavier economic burden some states are experiencing during this pandemic that is causing the premature relaxing of lockdown orders?
Of course, it could be all of the above. And we must also account for the fact that the pandemic started later in some states compared to others. Lastly, it may be the importance of international trade in general, not just trade with China, that compels some states to re-open too early.
A Quick and Dirty State-level Model
Figure 3 shows the parameter estimates and diagnostics for a linear model explaining the number of new daily COVID-19 cases relative to state-level peaks. [Keep in mind, these results represent the COVID-19 data through June 3rd. We have seen throughout this pandemic that new case levels can change rapidly from day-to-day — which will affect static model results like the one I’m reporting here.]
Here are the bottom line findings for the state-level COVID-19 data through June 3rd:
(1) The most important correlate with new COVID-19 cases is the percentage of a state’s GDP related to trade with China (standardized coefficient = 0.55, p = 0.002).
(2) There is a partisan effect: States with Republican governors are having greater difficulties bringing down the relative number of new COVID-19 cases (standardized coefficient = 0.30, p = 0.02).
(3) While not statistically significant from the common frequentist perspective (p > 0.05), there is an indication that Atlantic and Gulf coastal states are also experiencing higher relative numbers of new COVID-19 cases.
(4) Not significant in explaining the relative number of new cases are these variables: (a) Days since the first confirmed COVID-19 case, and (b) the relative importance of international trade on a state’s GDP.
Figure 2: A state-level linear model explaining the number of new daily COVID-19 cases (7-day moving average) relative to state-level peaks (7-day moving average).
Final Thoughts
Ideally, the above linear model would have accounted for the different speeds at which states are rolling back their lockdown orders. I suspect — rather, I’m fairly confident — the state-level policy differences are in fact what we are seeing with the significant parameters in the above model.
The premature loosening of lockdowns by Republican governors and the start of the vacation season (i.e., people love warm beaches) are probably playing a small but meaningful role in recent upticks in new COVID-19 cases.
However, the most important factor appears to be the extent to which a state relies on trade with China. And it is important to note that China’s economy is substantially open again. The pressure on U.S. governors to re-open their own state economies will only increase as China and other countries return their economies back to (near) normal.
Christopher Rodriguez’ mother: “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 3, 2020)
We, Americans, are living in dark times, though far from the darkest of times.
And, no, I do not blame Donald Trump for George Floyd’s death and the subsequent rioting, though Trump’s organic inability to show empathy for other humans crushes any hope that his words will lead us from this dark place.
And I also don’t blame Joe Biden, the author of the 1994 Crime Bill that many claim is responsible for this nation’s high incarceration rate. Along with his daily offering of platitudes from his basement, bland even by centrist candidate standards, Biden has singled out Trump’s cavalier attitude about police violence for creating an environment where something like the Floyd tragedy was inevitable.
More troublesome about Biden, however, is his lifetime penchant for exaggerating (and, in some cases, manufacturing) stories of his political accomplishments. As comedian Jimmy Dore describes the presumptive Democratic nominee: “Joe lies about his record more often than he blinks.”
Not exactly true, but closer to the truth than comfortable.
“I’m the most progressive presidential candidate in this race,” was Biden’s go-to line during the 2020 nomination race when pressed to cite his progressive credentials. “On health care, pay equality, voting rights, climate change, I’ve led.”
But, in words and in deeds, Biden doesn’t look so progressive. In the current campaign, Biden draws significant campaign contributions from health care and pharmaceutical executives, and even launched his 2020 election effort with a fundraiser co-hosted by Dan Hilferty, CEO of Independence Blue Cross.
Biden’s 2020 campaign is also central to the health care lobby’s effort to discredit Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All proposal.
“Part of a multi-front corporate effort to defeat the policy,” according to journalist Branko Marcetic, author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. “In Biden, the health care industry has found its guy.”
On climate change, a similar story emerges. While Biden did introduce the Global Climate Protection Act (GCPA) of 1987, the first of its kind, the GCPA merely funded a task force to develop a national strategy for addressing global warming.
The surge in U.S. fossil fuel production under the Obama administration is one thing, but nothing highlights Biden’s internal contradictions on climate change than the work he did as vice president to engineer a $50 million aid package to Ukraine for the development of its shale gas infrastructure and expanding its fossil fuel industry. At a time when the Paris Agreement was trying to get the country’s to draw down their greenhouse gas emissions, Biden was helping Ukraine do the opposite.
In a scathing rebuttal to Biden’s claim as a “leader on climate change,” GQ’s Luke Darby recently wrote: “Biden’s pitch for his climate policy is that it’s the most realistic. That’s true in a sense — it offers the fossil fuel industry the least disruption and headache possible while gently trying to reduce carbon emissions. But his plan doesn’t seem realistic in terms of actually fighting climate change.”
Biden banks on the credulity of the American voter and on no subject does Biden push those limits more than when he talks about his record on criminal justice.
When asked by CNBC’s John Harwood if he was ashamed of the 1994 Crime Bill he authored, Biden replied, “Not at all. When you take a look at the money in the crime bill, the vast majority went to reducing sentences, diverting people from going to jail for drug offenses and into drug courts and providing for boot camps instead of sending people to prison.”
Biden continued: “(The 1994 Crime Bill) put a hundred thousand cops in the street when community policing was working neighborhoods were not only safer but they were more harmonious. The reason why the cops originally opposed my hundred thousand cops from this community policing piece is because it’s highly intensive. It means they literally got out of the cars and learned who owned the local drug store and local neighborhood bar and they were engaged in the neighborhood which built confidence (in those neighborhoods).”
Its a nice story, but like most anything a politician claims, the truth lies somewhere between the politician’s rhetoric and their sharpest critics.
One of Biden sharpest critics, President Trump, while praising his own criminal justice reform accomplishments, tweeted in May that “anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected. In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you.”
A bold statement, but misses the mark with its focus on the 1994 Crime Bill, a piece of legislation that some policy analysts consider more impactful in its symbolism than its substance.
According to Udi Ofer, the American Civil Liberty Union’s Director of the Campaign for Smart Justice: “The 1994 crime bill gave the federal stamp of approval for states to pass even more tough-on-crime laws. By 1994, all states had passed at least one mandatory minimum law, but the 1994 crime bill encouraged even more punitive laws and harsher practices on the ground, including by prosecutors and police, to lock up more people and for longer periods of time.”
But the other significant impact of the 1994 Crime Bill was how it changed the Democratic Party’s political approach to criminal justice reform.
Writes Ofer: “Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Democrats wanted to wrest control of crime issues from Republicans, so the two parties began a bidding war to increase penalties for crime, trying to outdo one another. The 1994 crime bill was a key part of the Democratic strategy to show that it can be tougher-on crime than Republicans.”
Biden was a central player in that strategic shift within the Democratic Party.
Given that context, the current crisis over George Floyd’s death by a Minneapolis police officer may be less of a partisan advantage for the Democrats than commonly assumed.
Is Trump culpable in Floyd’s death? No, but…
President Trump’s defense on the question of police violence is unnecessarily weak. Inexplicably, he has repeatedly promoted police violence against crime suspects, both as a candidate and as president. The following video (and others like it) is exhibit number one:
“I’d like to punch them in the face,” Trump has said on more than one occasion.
President Trump’s too numerous and artless incitements for police violence may not be responsible for any specific excessive use of force case carried out by law enforcement, but he’s still culpable for giving spiritual support to such tactics. Police culture in the U.S. has always been too permissive in how it allows officers to apply potentially deadly force and Trump, through his frequently disordered rhetoric, has reinforced those counterproductive rules of engagement.
Joe Biden’s relationship with U.S. crime and law enforcement policy is more complicated and requires a significant amount of effort to reconcile his legislative record with his campaign rhetoric.
Spoiler alert: Joe Biden’s record on crime and police enforcement is not as constructive as CNN and MSNBC want you to believe, but its not as egregious as others suggest. It’s nuanced, while still being bad.
Any discussion on Joe Biden and crime law must start with Reagan
While political pundits and Biden critics focus on the 1994 Crime Bill, the real story behind Biden’s view on criminal justice goes back further in time.
The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan was a traumatic experience for Democrats (myself included). Here he was, a far-right conservative and former B-movie actor, winning the White House at a time when the U.S. was still healing from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.
The 1980 election felt as if the country learned nothing since John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the Vietnam War.
Had Reagan’s presidency failed, the FDR-New Deal wing of the Democratic Party would have enjoyed both consolation and reinvigoration heading into the 1984 presidential election. Instead, the party suffered the worst defeat in its history.
In that same 1984 election, U.S. Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) won re-election by a 20-percentage-point margin; and, to the southwest of Delaware, two other young Democrats, Al Gore (D-Tennessee) and Bill Clinton (D-Arkansas), won a U.S. Senate and gubernatorial election, respectively, by even larger margins.
For good reason, all three were rising stars within the Democratic Party.
While strategically adopting liberal positions on some social issues (women’s rights, the environment) but not others (abortion, criminal justice), these New Democrats — loosely organized through the Democratic Leadership Council — were best distinguished from the Democratic old guard by their willingness to work with the corporate sector in crafting policy solutions, as opposed to aligning against those same business interests.
The working-class-versus-big-business model the Democrats had used to win 8-out-of-12 elections between 1932 and 1976, was now 0–2 going into the 1988 election. [Economic progress will do that.]
In the 1988 Democratic nomination race, Joe Biden and Al Gore were dark horse favorites, but eventually lost to the party establishment favorite — Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
Side bar:Few remember how the Reverend Jesse Jackson received nearly 30 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 1988, finishing a solid second to Dukakis, and who aggressively forced the Democratic Party to make its nomination more democratic, directly paving the way for a young U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2008 to take down the Democratic establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. There is no Barack Obama without Jesse Jackson.
If the Democratic Party establishment is good at anything, it is good at misreading mainstream America.
Where the 1980 Reagan victory was traumatizing but rationalizable, George H. W. Bush’s victory in 1988 was deflating. The Democratic Party couldn’t even beat a low-charisma, Republican hack.
Contributing to Dukakis’ defeat was a Bush political ad crafted by the Republican’s dark lord, Lee Atwater. The ad featured Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who was granted 10 weekend prison passes during Dukakis’ tenure as Massachusetts governor and who used his last one to assault a Maryland man and rape the man’s fiance.
On the issue of criminal justice, the Democratic Party was never the same after Willie Horton; and Joe Biden, who had already helped write three substantive, Republican-supported crime bills before the 1988 election, became one of the party’s most important voices on the subject after that election.
As a volunteer for the 1988 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, I saw in real-time the rise of the New Democrats over the New Deal old guard between the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections. Presidential candidates like Missouri’s Richard Gephardt and California’s Jerry Brown tried to carry on the FDR tradition, but to no avail. By 1992, the Democrats were determined they would not lose to H. W. Bush again without putting up a credible fight. That meant, in part, abandoning party doctrine on criminal justice — and no Democrat did that better than Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.
Cynical or not, the Clinton Sister Souljah tactic was effective and he won the 1992 election.
At the focal point of that ideological shift within the Democratic Party was Senator Joe Biden, who happened to already chair Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992.
The 1994 Crime Bill in context
President Clinton’s job approval plummeted to 37 percent within the first year of his presidency, driven down partly from a failed effort to produce a viable health care reform package he had promised during the 1992 campaign.
However, after successfully pushing ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement through the U.S. Senate in November 1993, Clinton’s public support experienced a significant, if only temporary, rise.
In the midst of his approval rise in late-1993, Clinton pushed for a crime bill that would place himself (and his party) to the right of the Reagan-era 1984 crime bill, a piece of legislation that, among other things, increased sentences for felons committing crimes with firearms and who had also been convicted of certain crimes three or more times. The 1984 Crime Bill also increased federal penalties for the cultivation, possession, or transfer of marijuana.
With the help of U.S. Representative Jack Brooks (D–TX) and Senator Biden in 1993, Clinton wanted a crime bill that would ensure his presidency and party would not be perceived as weak on the issue.
Figure 1 shows the scale of the violent crime problem Clinton faced in 1993. When the 1994 Crime Bill was being written, the rate of violent crime in the U.S. was at an all-time high post-1960 (approximately 750 violent crimes per 100,000 people per year).
Figure 1: The U.S. Violent Crime Rate (per 100,000 people) from 1960 to 2016.
The 1994 Crime Bill, the largest U.S. history in monetary terms, provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for crime prevention programs. It passed the U.S. House on a 235–195 vote on August 21, 1994 and passed the Senate August 25th on a 61 to 38 vote, including support from seven Republicans.
The 1994 Crime Bill was signed into law on September 13, 1994, two months before one of the biggest Democratic midterm election defeats in history.
Did the 1994 Crime Bill work?
The precise impact of the 1994 Crime Bill is a contentious question.
Indisputable is that the U.S. violent crime rate fell around the time the 1994 Crime Bill was passed.
The drop in crime after 1994 is the function of (1) increases in the number of police, (2) increases in the size of the incarcerated population, (3) the waning of the crack epidemic, and (4) the legalization of abortion in the 1970s.
All four are plausible explanations, but an examination of the aggregate data casts some doubt on the importance of Levitt’s first two explanations.
Figures 2 and 3, respectively, show the over time changes in the incarcerated population and the relative size of the U.S. police force.
Figure 2: Incarceration rate per 100,000 people from 1925 to 2014
The US incarceration rate under state and federal jurisdiction per 100,000 population 1925–2008 (omits local jail inmates). Graph by Smallman12q (talk)
Figure 3: Incarceration rate per 100,000 people from 1925 to 2014
A topline examination of Figures 2 and 3 suggests that the 1994 Crime Bill did little to alter the trajectory of the U.S. incarceration rate or the relative number of police on the street.
If anything, the incarceration rate and relative number of police officers on the street plateaued soon after the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill — hardly the basis for indicting Biden on growing a police state or the unnecessary incarceration of Americans. Which is not to say both aren’t happening, they just aren’t a product of the 1994 Crime Bill.
Rather, as seen in Figure 4 below, the rapid rise in incarceration rates and the number of police on the street occurred after two political milestones: (1) Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of a “War on Drugs,” and (2) Reagan’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (i.e., the 1984 Crime Bill).
Figure 4: Number of incarcerated Americans from 1920 to 2008
The incarceration rate for Americans rose 250 percent from 1971 to 1994 (or about 11 percent per year), but following the 1994 Crime Bill rose only 15 percent from 1995 to 2000 (or about 3 percent per year).
As for the relative number of police officers, the pivot point appears to be around the 1984 Crime Bill. From 1975 to 1984, the number of police per 100,000 residents fell 1.7 percent; however, from 1985 to 1994, the relative number of police grew 9.5 percent (or about 1 percent per year).
And how did the 1994 Crime Bill impact the relative level of police employment? It grew 7 percent from 1994 to 2001 (or about 1 percent per year).
The straightforward conclusion from this aggregate data is that the 1994 Crime Bill reinforced trends already established by Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s 1984 Crime Bill.
And where did Joe Biden stand on the 1984 Crime Bill? He voted for it, along with 36 other Senate Democrats (Side Note: North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms voted against the bill.)
As for the 1994 Crime Bill, the man most responsible for it, President Bill Clinton, would eventually express regret over the portions of the 1994 Crime Bill that led to an increased prison population, particularly the three strikes provision, widely considered a failed policy by policy analysts.
Biden’s criminal justice record is more than the 1994 Crime Bill
When judging Biden’s entire career on criminal justice reform, the analysis must include not only the 1994 Crime Bill but also the Comprehensive Control Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 — all criminal justice bills Biden co-authored or had significant influence over its content. All together, those four bills did the following:
allowed police to seize someone’s property without proving the person is guilty of a crime,
created a significant sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine (which helped expand the current racial disparities in incarceration rates),
increased prison sentences for drug possession,
funded the building of more state prisons,
funded the hiring of hundred of thousands of additional police officers, and,
used grant programs to encourage more drug-related arrests— an significant escalation in the War on Drugs started under Nixon.
Our criminal justice system must be focused on redemption and rehabilitation…Create a new $20 billion competitive grant program to spur states to shift from incarceration to prevention.
End, once and for all, the federal crack and powder cocaine disparity.
Biden helped create the very problems he is today asking us to believe he can now fix. Forgive me, but that sounds like the Arsonist-Fireman Syndrome.
On the positive side, the U.S. experienced a dramatic decline in violent crime rates after 1994, and to the extent the 1994 Crime Bill and bills preceding it are responsible, Biden deserves some of the credit.
But is this decline the result of deterrence (e.g., stricter laws and enforcement) or incapacitation (i.e., taking criminals off the street)?
There seems to be little consensus among social scientists as to why violent crime rates have fallen since 1994.
“Despite the rich history of econometric modelling spanning over 40 years, there is arguably no consensus on whether there is a strong deterrent effect of law enforcement policies on crime activity,” write economists Maurice Bun, Richard Kelaher, Vasilis Sarafidis and Don Weatherburn, who found in their own 2016 research in Australia that “increasing the risk of apprehension and conviction is more influential in reducing crime than raising the expected severity of punishment.”
Therein lies the problem with overly harsh conclusions about Biden’s criminal justice record (or excessively laudatory ones). We generally can’t assign levels of credit or blame on extremely complex social processes.
On the first-order effects (action ⟹ consequences), there is modest evidence that the “tough-on-crime” laws from 1984 to the present helped lower violent crime rates, though exactly how those laws lowered crimes rates remains debatable. Was it deterrence or incapacitation? Probably both.
But particularly with incapacitation, the higher-order effects (consequences ⟹ consequences, i.e., “consequences have their own consequences”) may have had contradictory effects for the communities where their young men have been disproportionately incarcerated. On the one hand, these communities are demonstrably safer today than they were 30 years ago — that has distinct economic benefits. At the same time, generations of young men who could have been adding to the economic base of their communities are, instead, economically marginalized (often permanently) by the broader society.
Over his long legislative history, Joe Biden has addressed urban crime the way the U.S. military addresses its urban-based enemies — destroy the village in order to save it.
Yes, crime is down, but at what cost? Were there better ways to reduce crime without creating permanently distressed communities? [Yes, there were.]
If Biden wants some of the credit for the unprecedented decline in U.S. violent crime since 1994, he is more than justified. He cut his political teeth during Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and achieved significant senatorial power when the Reagan Revolution was at its apex.
Biden’s criminal justice legacy is the product of those two prominent political forces. He doesn’t run from this reality. In fact, he embraces it.
However, at the same time, he must own the consequences of those policies used to achieve this landmark drop in crime, for they created the context within which deaths like George Floyd’s are sadly inevitable.
Too many of our urban police forces act more like occupying armies than as servants to a public they take an oath to protect. That reality is the dark side of the “tough-on-crime” policies politicians like Biden enacted.
Joe Biden needs to own responsibility for that result too.
K.R.K.
Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
Or tweet me at: @KRobertKroeger1
APPENDIX
I find this graphic distressing. It shows the incarceration rates around the world if every U.S. state were a country. For example, Hawaii has an incarceration rate similar to Cuba’s!
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 28, 2020)
“I don’t believe I am costing lives at all,” said Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) in late March as he rejected calls for a statewide stay-at-home (SaH) order. “The effects that (a statewide SaH) will have on everyday people are dramatic. That means businesses will close, people will lose their jobs, the economy will be in worse shape than ever.”
At the time Governor Parson said those words, eight Missourians had lost their lives to COVID-19. Two months later, the death toll stands at 705 (or about 115 people per 1 million Missouri residents), putting the Show-Me state at 26th among the 50 states (plus District of Columbia) in the relative number of COVID-19 deaths. Missouri is ranked 37th in the relative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases at 2,088 per 1 million people.
In other words, Missouri’s performance so far in containing the coronavirus is roughly average to above-average.
It can’t emphasized enough that this pandemic is still an ongoing and many of the Middle America states that refused to impose stay-at-home orders, such as Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas, are now in the middle of their first wave of cases (as opposed to states like New York and New Jersey that are near the end of the first wave).
Still, it is legitimate to consider whether Governor Parson was at least partially correct about SaH orders (though he did end up issuing a SaH order on April 6th). This question is particularly important as all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) are in the midst of slowly re-opening for business — some faster than others.
What is not helpful nor analytically pertinent is the suggestion that one party is wholly responsible for increasing the number of COVID-19 deaths or worsening an economic recession merely for political gain.
At least, as of today, explicitly political variables (e.g., a state governor’s political party, Trump’s share of the statewide vote in 2016, etc.) offer little information that can explain the relative number of COVID-19 cases and deaths across states.
However, today we are in a period where many of the Democrat-led states (CT, HA, KY, LA, MI, MT, NY, NJ, OR, RI, PA, WA) are witnessing significantly lower numbers of new cases as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic nears its end in those states (see Figure 1). Six out of the 10 states with the lowest relative number of new cases in the past week (May 19th to 25th) are led by Democratic governors.
In contrast, four out of the 10 states with the highest relative number of new cases new cases in the past week are led by Republican governors.
Figure 1: A state’s recent new cases (7-day moving average, May 19–25) as a percent of the state’s highest 7-day average (Data from 22 Jan — 25 May)
Data Source: Johns Hopkins University — CSSE
If there is a partisan effect on how long this pandemic is extending, it is more subtle than appreciated.
A more explanatory hypothesis might be that the start of the summer tourism season is starting to increase new COVID-19 cases for coastal states (AL, CA, GA, ME, MD, MS, NC, SC, TX, VA). Figure 2 shows a selection of beach states and their 7-day moving average trends in new cases.
Figure 2: New COVID-19 Case Trends by Selected Beach States (as of 25 May)
Data Source: Johns Hopkins University — CSSE
We’ve seen the pictures and video from the Memorial Day weekend: Ocean City, MD tourists cramming along the boardwalk with not even a quarter of the people wearing face masks.
Even you believe it is hard to transmit the COVID-19-causing virus (SARS-CoV-2) or believe its effect is not significantly different from the seasonal flu, not donning a mask is disrespectful to those who believe otherwise. Its called being neighborly and its a small price to pay if that is what it takes to keep our beaches and outdoor entertainment facilities open.
In the next 14 days or so, we will see the impact of the Memorial Day weekend on new COVID-19 cases. If we don’t see a bump, expect almost all states to accelerate their phase-out of business closures and SaH orders. If we witness a surge, on the other hand, the recriminations and calls for extending SaH orders will thunder across cable news networks and social media.
New COVID-19 Path Model (updated through 25 May 2020)
Figure 3 (below) shows the coefficient estimates for a path (mediation) model estimated in JASP, a free statistical software package available here. More detailed results for this path model are in the Appendix at the end of this essay.
As with previous path models I’ve estimated for the COVID-19 pandemic, the outcome of interest is the relative fatality rate for COVID-19 (measured in each state as the number of fatalities per 1 million people). The mediating variable is the relative confirmed case rate (number of cases per 1 million people) and the other predictor variables are: (1) A binary variable for West Coast states (CA, HA, OR, WA), (2) A binary variable for whether a state imposed a SaH order, (3) a binary variable for states that imposed travel restrictions, (4) the number of COVID-19 tests (per 1 million people), and (5) a state’s population density. [Note: An indicator variable for “Beach” states was only weakly correlated with the outcome and mediation variables and was therefore left out of the final path model.]
Overall, the path model in Figure 3 explains 75 percent of the variance in relative confirmed case rates and 93 percent of the variance in relative fatality rates.
Figure 3: COVID-19 Path Model (U.S. data updated through 25 May 2020)
Data Source: Johns Hopkins University — CSSE; Data Analysis by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
In the case of COVID-19-related fatalities through May 25th, by far, the most significant correlate is the relative number of confirmed cases. That is not surprising. More puzzling is that SaH states have experienced disproportionately more COVID-19 fatalities than non-SaH states, all else equal. This relationship is weak enough, however, that it could change when the first wave of this pandemic is over for every state. Those two variables were the only variables significantly correlated with COVID-19 fatalities.
The more interesting results are for the factors correlated with the relative number of confirmed cases where (as in past models I’ve estimated) a state’s population density and the number of COVID-19 tests (per 1 million people) are the most significant correlates with case rates.
However, we also find two policy variables negatively correlated with case rates (SaH orders and Travel Restrictions). In other words, the presence of a SaH order and travel restrictions in a state independently correlate with fewer COVID-19 cases in that state. This is in consistent with our expectations that these policies should suppress confirmed case numbers (if only temporarily).
Finally, the West Coast states (CA, HA, OR, WA) are also negatively associated with relative confirmed case rates. This relationship has been fairly consistent over time, if previous path models are an indication.
The significance of West Coast states, however, may not be a function of the specific policies in those states (though all four were aggressive in putting SaH orders in place early). There is epidemiological evidence that the U.S. West Coast has been predominately hit by a slightly weaker form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus compared to the U.S. East Coast. For this reason, I hesitate to assume West Coast state policies are the sole reason for their relatively lower case rates. It most likely a combination of the SARS-CoV-2’s pathogenic characteristics and state policies.
Final Thoughts
As I must always caveat any statistical finding related to the COVID-19 pandemic: the pandemic is far from over. In fact, we may only be in the first of many contagion waves for this virus, according to The University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). Indeed, the hopeful discovery and production of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine by early next year (or possibly late this year) may not completely eliminate the presence of COVID-19 in our lives.
Furthermore, our knowledge about this virus seems to change by the day. On day the CDC can say picking up the virus from surface exposure, and the next day the CDC retracts that statement and says “it is possible to become infected by touching a surface containing the active virus.”
We just don’t know enough to make strong declarative statements yet on what policies will or won’t defeat SARS-CoV-2.
For all of these reasons, the partisan narratives polluting our airwaves over this virus are not helping in the slightest. These partisan tirades from both sides are, in fact, hurting the learning process for those in a decision-making position who must increasingly filter out the noise to get to the facts.
No politician, in the U.S. or elsewhere, has made perfect decisions regarding COVID-19 and they will make mistakes going forward. [I know how successful New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been in pushing policies that have successfully suppressed the virus in her country; but, remember, New Zealand is an island. They have an advantage. The same goes for Hawaii.]
It is time to chuck the partisan noise driving the coronavirus narrative in the national media and, instead, focus on the actual facts.
Recent COVID-19 data has not been a good news story for a significant number of Republican-led states. Unfortunately for some Democrat-led states (e.g., CA), it has been a tough week for them too.
What is clear from a statistical point of view, the coronavirus does not give a bucket of owl spit about anyone’s political preferences. The coronavirus is brutally apolitical.
Slowly and methodically, the U.S. states are converging towards similar COVID-19 case and death rates, independent of partisanship or public policy. That does not mean public policy is irrelevant. Governors are merely rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Ask Hawaiians if state-level coronavirus policies have made a difference. They have mattered, as we can see with the significance of travel restrictions and statewide stay-at-home orders in the above path model.
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 26, 2020)
As a society we’ve become accustomed to seeing awkwardly shot cellphone videos of police officers using excessive force against African-American males.
Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. We know the names even if we don’t remember the details.
And with each new incident, the predictable responses on social media emerge: “If you’re smart, you do what the officer tells you to do,” “The police have to protect themselves” or “Why was he resisting arrest?”
Such reactions are understandable, though not particularly helpful or insightful.
However, an apparent excessive force incident from about nine months ago in Oklahoma put a slight twist on things. In the following video — shot by the police officer’s body cam — the subject who was taken aggressively to the ground and subsequently tased is a 65-year-old woman:
Don’t assume social media was sympathetic to her case just because she was an older woman and the purpose for the traffic stop was a defective tail light.
“You can tell this lady has been getting her way for years. Well not anymore.” (Benji)
“Turns an $80 ticket in to a felony pursuit. Brilliant.” (Anonymous)
“Result of when you’re used to getting everything you want for the past 70 years.” (Stephanie)
“I don’t feel any sympathy for this lady. She got what she deserved.” (Janae)
“I don’t know what level of entitlement she thinks she is due, but MAN was I satisfied when she got tased.” (Kimberly)
Nobody enjoys the snarkiness of social media more than I do, but my reaction to this video was somewhat different.
Here is where I agree with the majority of comments:
First, the woman’s reaction to the traffic stop was entirely inappropriate. She had been driving for six months with a broken tail light (presumably she was previously stopped for this violation) and she expects she can talk her way out of a ticket?
Um…no. Not going to happen.
Second, of all the things not to do during a routine traffic stop, the woman decides to drive off. Sweet Jesus, what did she expect would happen next?
The bottom line here: she’s at fault and the Cashion, Oklahoma police chief would have no reason to discipline this police officer.
Even within police departments with strict rules of engagement — where use of force is highly circumscribed — a police officer in this situation would be trained to draw his firearm and subdue the woman, including the use of a taser if necessary. A woman willing to drive away from a traffic stop, no matter how old, may be armed and dangerous.
But the fact that this is allowable police behavior is part of a much bigger problem within law enforcement: The basic theory guiding law enforcement’s rules of engagement must fit the crime.
The Context
The current social and political context makes reforming rules of engagement more important than ever for police departments. Some Americans (Blacks and Hispanics, in particular) have understandably grown more distrustful of the police.
Since 1993, according to the Gallup Poll, the average American citizen’s confidence in the police has narrowly ranged between 52 percent and 64 percent having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: U.S. Confidence in the Military, Police and Small Business over time
This possible downward spiral of trust and legitimacy between some communities and law enforcement could be toxic and whether those intertwined forces were at play with the woman and police officer in Oklahoma is uncertain, but definitely plausible.
Which is why I believe, now more than ever, the police need to rethink their rules of engagement in routine situations like the one in Oklahoma.
What happened didn’t need to happen and the burden to make sure it doesn’t happen must rest with the police.
Let us re-examine what happened in Cashion, Oklahoma to see how this situation could have been resolved much more peacefully. And, keep in mind, the highest priority for police departments when their police officers justifiably use force is the safety of those officers.
Early in the traffic stop, both the officer and woman are actually cordial with one another, though clearly the woman is annoyed. On the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center’s Use of Force Model, the interaction between citizen and officer is still in Level 1 (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Federal Law Enforcement Training Center’s Use of Force Model
A use-of-force continuous scale developed by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
At 0:29 in the video, however, the officer ceases to entertain the woman’s passive plea that she should not be fined for a safety equipment violation and asks her to leave her truck so he can arrest her.
Stop right there.
By the officer saying he was going to arrest the woman, his range of options for deescalating the conflict significantly narrowed. On the Use of Force scale, he’s on already Level 3, even as the woman is merely complaining that she doesn’t deserve an $80 ticket.
At 0:47, the officer says again, “You’re under arrest,” to which she replies, “No, I’m not.”
At this point, this incident isn’t going to end with anything but the woman being handcuffed and taken to the police station…over an $80 safety violation on her truck.
Also not helping the situation, the officer’s ego is now threatened if she does not immediately submit.
Arrests are emotionally violent acts, if not physically violent. The natural human reaction at being arrested therefore is often fight or flight.
At 1:04, the woman makes the unfortunate decision of choosing flight and drives off in her truck.
At 1:13, the officer has caught up to her and has his gun drawn as he approaches the woman’s truck. The incident is somewhere between Levels 3 and 4 on the Use of Force scale at this point.
All of this drama over an $80 safety equipment violation.
At 1:32 in the video, she is pulled out of the car and taken to the ground, at which point the officer tries to get her hands behind her back so he can cuff her.
When he fails to get the cuffs on, he pulls out his taser gun and uses it on the woman.
All because of an $80 safety equipment violation.
After he’s cuffed the woman, the officer asks her if she realizes she’s “gotten herself in a whole lot more trouble” for running off in her truck.
It almost sounds like a parent speaking to a child. And before you hoot and howl at how some adults aren’t much more emotionally developed than children, it is not the job of our police to raise us to be good adults. Their job is to protect and enforce. To the extent education is part of their job, it is not as a parent-to-a-child — and that is exactly how this interaction in Oklahoma comes across.
What possibly could have changed this outcome and still convey to the woman that, in the future, she must comply with vehicular safety equipment laws?
How do we get to the desired final outcome without the violence?
The problem starts with the law which requires ticketing officers to get a signature from the accused acknowledging the accused will appear in court. The signature, of course, does not imply guilt. It merely allows the accused to avoid getting arrested.
That seems like a good thing: I don’t have to get arrested for a broken tail light!
This legal requirement however makes the first direct, verbal interaction between the ticketing officer and the citizen a necessity. It cannot be avoided.
But why is that? We can get speeding tickets and traffic signal violations based merely on traffic cam evidence, why can’t the same be true for other plainly visible violations?
According to FindLaw.com, the issue is that localities using traffic cameras for enforcement must provide a warning sign, such as a green-yellow-red traffic light, a stop sign, or a speed limit sign. I’ve never seen a “Are your tail lights working?” sign.
“But I didn’t know my tail light was broken, officer!”
Not an excuse, drivers are supposed to know their vehicle is road safe every time they get in it and drive.
So, no, passive traffic cam enforcement isn’t going to work in the Oklahoma lady’s case. She had a broken tail light.
But there is a key moment in the Oklahoma incident where the need for a signature is OBE (overtaken-by-events).
When she drives off, she’s fleeing the scene of an alleged crime where she is the suspect.
At that point, why should the officer go after her? Unless he suspects a more serious crime is taking place and the traffic violation is merely a pretense to get the driver and truck stopped, why can’t the officer let her drive off?
I can already share the answers I’ve received to that question.
“It sets a bad example.”
“Some people will think they never need to obey the police.”
“Police can’t do their jobs if people can drive away.”
“If we don’t enforce minor laws, people will think they can commit more serious crimes.”
Those answers may all contain truths, but don’t forget, she drove off (a felony) after refusing to accept an $80 ticket for a broken tail light. This is not a high crime, even with the felony aspect. And, no, thinking I can drive away from a vehicle safety ticket doesn’t necessarily make me more likely to rob a bank.
More importantly, our law enforcement establishment and other legal authorities have many tools proportionate to the crime to penalize this woman and ensure her compliance with the law in the future.
If at 0:47 in the video, instead of telling the woman she was going to be arrested, the officer could have said, “If you refuse to sign this ticket, I have your license plate number, this car will be impounded and you will face additional fines, possibly even jail time.”
If she decides to drive off, from that point forward, the municipal authority can levy fines that, if ignored, can be increased appropriately. The authorities can prevent her from receiving local licenses and approvals (business, hunting, home improvement, etc.), as well as other punishments, which can be applied without arresting her and putting her in jail.
But do not misunderstand my proposal. Once a police officer says, “You are under arrest,” driving off or fleeing is a serious crime. What I am proposing is a rule of engagement that avoids an officer needing to say, “You are under arrest.”
Of course, people cannot flout the law, no matter how minor the offense. But the scale of the punishment and how it is enforced is equally important.
In my opinion, throwing a 65-year-old woman resisting arrest to the ground and using a taser on her is not appropriate given her crime is refusing to accept a ticket for a vehicle safety violation and driving off.
Vehicle Safety Laws Are Important
One last comment I received to the first draft of this essay deserves some attention.
“You diminish the seriousness of vehicle safety laws which can, when violated, lead to accidents and deaths.” (My wife)
That comment resonates with me and I do not consider such laws as unimportant. They are, in fact, critical to community safety.
But show me the evidence that arrests like that of the woman in Cashion, Oklahoma lead to better overall outcomes for a community than my solution (let her drive off, impound the vehicle, impose additional fines).
One cannot assume arresting people makes them more compliant in these types of crimes.
I suspect they do not, and may even cause the exact opposite outcomes.
K.R.K.
Send comments, traffic fines and arrest warrants to: kroeger98@yahoo.com Or tweet to: @KRobertKroeger1
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 26, 2020)
I stopped counting at 50 — the number essays that came up in Google when I searched on “Why I am not voting…”
And that was after filtering down to essays focused on not voting for president, as opposed to not voting for a particular candidate or party.
So when I decided to write this essay, I knew I wouldn’t say anything new or novel. And that is not my intent.
Rather, I believe the more people who extend their voice into the public arena about their disaffection with the American political system by posting on Medium.com, Facebook, Twitter, or their personal websites, the stronger our message to the two major parties and the news media will be that our political system doesn’t represent our interests or values well enough to inspire voting.
In writing this, I understand that the news media and the social media platforms consciously choose to exclude voices outside their definition of the mainstream. [To be fair, this has been the case since the invention of the movable metal type printing press. Gutenberg printed the Bible after all — what was more mainstream in 15th-century Europe than that?]
Facebook explicitly bans paid ads that suggest voting is useless or advise people not to vote, under the justification that they are fighting voter suppression and interference. More ominously, Facebook announced last year that their “systems are now more effective at proactively detecting and removing this harmful content. We use machine learning to help us quickly identify potentially incorrect voting information and remove it.”
[A Facebook public relations representative did not reply to my inquiries over whether Facebook’s machine learning algorithm censored posts promoting or describing personal reasons for not voting.]
However, Facebook, Google and Twitter’s track record suggests they feel legally and ethically justified in targeting and suppressing a broad range of political speech that deviates from a mainstream consensus. [Comedian Jimmy Dore’s magnificent, towering rant against Twitter over its censoring of tweets suggesting Democrat’s should not have voted in their primaries during the coronavirus pandemic is worth a look-see here.]
My reason for writing this essay focuses on my own sentiments and I am not suggesting people who feel represented under our current political system should stop voting just because I’m not inclined to do so. In fact, if such a person were to do so, it would dilute my message to the two political parties.
But I know there are people like me (if past non-voting behavior is an indication), and if they read this essay, perhaps they might realize they are far from alone.
There are three issues that I expect my preferred presidential candidate to address in a coherent, credible way. I don’t necessarily expect the candidate to know the specifics underlying these issues, but I need to trust their broad intentions. [The only candidate to make me feel that way since Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 has been Tulsi Gabbard.]
Here are my issues:
(1) Ending our nation’s forever wars,
(2) Reversing monetary and fiscal policies that have helped to increase income inequality over the past 30 years, and
(3) Moving this country significantly closer to a universal health care system.
I could have easily added education costs and climate change, but those issues wouldn’t change my decision not to vote for President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden. From my perspective, they are bad on all these issues, and its not even close. You are free to disagree.
Ending America’s Forever Wars
This is an easy one. The Obama-Biden administration continued George W. Bush’s occupation of two countries (Iraq, Afghanistan) and decided to bomb five more (Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan), eventually putting troops in Syria and leaving the country so destabilized that 400,000 Syrian civilians would lose their lives in a civil war which started in 2011.
Barack Obama was the biggest disappointment as president in my lifetime. I feared George W. Bush’s oil buddies would lead this country to a near apocalyptic disaster in the Middle East and they didn’t disappoint, but at least they kept their unwinnable wars down to two.
Biden has been a stronger defender of the Obama war record, even suggesting during a trip to Turkey in early 2016, as the U.S. turned its military focus off of arming anti-Assad jihadists and towards rolling back ISIS, that the U.S. should use its military to take out Assad. The Obama foreign policy team and U.S. military leaders quickly distanced themselves from Biden’s informal remarks, forcing his staff to promptly issue a clarification saying “there is no change in U.S. policy (in Syria).”
If you are tired of Trump’s “off-the-cuff” U.S. foreign policy changes, Biden may not be your relief.
As for Trump’s national security policy, it looks remarkably similar to Obama’s but with the palpable threat of a war with Iran to make my blood pressure even higher.
Trump has not ended any war during his first term and there is no reason to think he will in a second term.
Decreasing Income Inequality
Trump’s administration has spurred real income growth among working class and minority Americans. Whatever damage the coronavirus pandemic has done to the U.S. economy, up to that point, Trump had been successfully in lifting incomes across all income groups.
But in terms of economic inequality, the Trump administration has continued and amplified the same monetary and fiscal policies that have led to the secular increase in U.S. income inequality since the 1980s.
Figure 1: Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% in the U.S.
Trump didn’t cause income inequality, but the economic growth during his administration has not reduced it. In fact, in addressing the economic damage done by the coronavirus pandemic, Trump and congressional Democrats have mothered one of the most unbalanced economic rescue bills in U.S. history — the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which includes a tax provision that allows taxpayers to use some business losses to reduce taxes owed on non-business income, such as profits from investments.
Biden, like most congressional Democrats, has expressed support for the CARES Act and its tax provisions. And while Biden’s campaign has issued nebulous policy proposals that would extend direct financial support to some Americans affected by the coronavirus, Biden has offered no ideas on the scale of Change.org’s Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal where monthly payments of $2,000 would go to everyone in the U.S. while the pandemic continues. [The CARES Act distributed $1,200 to some Americans based on income.]
But pandemic stimulus packages aside, the causes of income inequality are rooted much deeper within U.S. public policy. For example, following the worldwide financial crisis of 2007–08, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE) policy — where it buys long-term securities to push down long-term interest rates — resulted in the Fed accumulating $4.5 trillion worth of assets by late 2014. The QE-era Fed policies have been on “as expansive a setting as it ever has been — not only in this recovery, but arguably in the history of the nation,” according to the New York Times.
The Fed’s QE policies during the Obama administration helped grow the Top 1%’s share of total net worth by almost 25 percent (see Figure 1), and that is not just the opinion of people like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Fed itself acknowledges the connection. In May 2013, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher acknowledged on CNBC that “cheap money has made rich people richer, but has not done quite as much for working Americans.”
More recently, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May said the same thing about similar monetary policies in her country: “”Monetary policy — in the form of super-low interest rates and quantitative easing — has helped those on the property ladder at the expense of those who can’t afford to own their own home.”
And where do Trump and Biden stand on these Fed policies — which are relevant again given the pandemic-caused economic slowdown? Not a word.
How about their policy proposals addressing other causes of inequality, such as CEO compensation or capital-friendly tax policies? Crickets.
Universal Health Care
On his campaign website, Biden posts his five-point plan to improve the U.S. health care system. Among his proposals are lowering Medicare eligibility to 60 years old and including a public option available to individuals not happy with the employer-based health plan.
I could forgive Biden for putting his health care ideas 24th on his list of priorities, if I thought he was willing and capable to push for his health care proposals once elected. But I don’t.
The Obama-Biden administration had two years where the Democrats controlled both congressional chambers and, while letting Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats craft what would become known as Obamacare, rolled over like a love sick puppy when a public option was taken out of the legislation.
“Ultimately, the public option failed as a result of many factors, including lack of support from moderate and conservative Democrats, opposition from Republicans and health care interest groups, and ultimately an absence of strong support from the White House,” according to Helen A. Halpin and Peter Harbage of HealthAffairs.org.
Will things be different if Joe Biden is elected? Not likely, according to Wendell Potter, a former Cigna executive turned private healthcare whistleblower. “Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer know the health care special interests can plow millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates they favor or think they can influence. Because we have no real constraints on that spending, the special interests, as always, are contributing to candidates in both parties, and Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer and others who raise money for themselves and other Dems want to keep as much of it flowing to Dems as possible.”
Given that so many health care insurance, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical executives orbit around the Biden campaign, it is safe to assume they have his ear on health care policy and any real reform ideas, such as a public option, will not make their way into a Biden administration health care bill.
When judging candidates, more important to me than any single issue is whether I trust a candidate to do what they say. In the case of Biden on health care reform, he’s earned my lack of trust.
As for Trump on health care reform, he’s earned a D- up to now, and there is no reason to believe a second Trump term would be different.
It’s a two-party system, but is it my civic duty to pick sides?
Barely a week into my first political campaign job as a canvass coordinator for Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin’s 1984 Senate run, I was once told by my boss, longtime Democratic operative, Teresa Vilmain, “Don’t let people tell you they are not voting or are supporting a third party candidate. We are a two-party system. That’s the choice.”
Her logic was nonsense then and sounds worse today.
For one, we are not explicitly a two-party system. The Constitution doesn’t even mention political parties, and for good reason, according to historian Sarah Pruitt:
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties — or “factions,” as they called them — as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
Secondly, non-voting is a legitimate voting choice that carries with it, in the aggregate, significant information that the two major parties can use to increase their chances of winning the next election.
I believe that strategic use of my vote choice in 2020 is more impactful than voting for a candidate that does not come close to representing my interests or values.
Not voting is not a wasted vote when done for this reason. If enough people who feel the same way consistently do not vote, at some point, one of the two parties — probably the one that loses consistently — is going to get their act together and start representing us disaffected non-voters.
I can dream.
I use this analogy when talking about my decision not to vote:
Imagine a country where there are only two movie studios and the people in this country have the habit of going to the movies one weekend every month, regardless of what movies are showing or their quality.
Imagine in this same country the two movies have found it easier to make bad movies, and since the people keep going to the movies regardless of quality, the two movies start making only bad movies.
The only way the two movie studios will start making good movies is if people stop going to see the bad movies.
A similar process has been at play with our two political parties. And, today, I see two presidential parties that make no effort to appeal to my interests and values and, instead, prefer the dark art of propaganda to make their candidates attractive to voters. The parties would rather put lipstick on pigs than modify their core ideas.
For my tastes, the two parties have been nominating gussied up pigs for decades and I’m tired of the farce— which today feels more like a straight up con job. Farces are at least entertaining.
So, President Trump and Mr. Biden, I’ve listened to your words and studied your policies, forgive me if I sit this one out.
K.R.K.
Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com or tweet me at: @KRobertKroeger1
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 25, 2020)
The analysis of stool samples is a vital screening method for medical conditions ranging from colorectal cancer, hookworm, rotaviruses, and lactose intolerance.
It seems only logical that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) could also be detected in stool samples.
In Paris, France, researchers monitored genome unit levels of SARS-CoV-2 in waste waters between March 5 to April 23 to determine if variations over time tracked closely with COVID-19 cases observed in the Paris-area.
“The viral genomes could be detected before the beginning of the exponential growth of the epidemic. As importantly, a marked decrease in the quantities of genomes units was observed concomitantly with the reduction in the number of new COVID-19 cases which was an expected consequence of the lockdown. As a conclusion, this work suggests that a quantitative monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 genomes in waste waters should bring important and additional information for an improved survey of SARS-CoV-2 circulation at the local or regional scale.”
If your reaction to this research is — “Aren’t we already doing this for other diseases and public health issues?” — you would be correct.
This type of real-time health monitoring method dates back at least to the 1990s when environmental scientists began to observe the presence of pharmaceuticals in local waste waters (including illicit drugs), according to Christian G. Daughton, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientist.
First proposed in 2012, Daughton has been developing a bioanalytic method called Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM) in which sewage is monitored for natural and anthropogenic chemicals produced by everyday actions, activities and behaviors of humans. One variation of this method — BioSCIM — is described by Daughton as “an approach roughly analogous to a hypothetical community-wide collective clinical urinalysis, or to a hypothetical en masse human biomonitoring program.”
Though privacy advocates may have reservations about the government or corporate entities monitoring something so private as our bodily wastes (the ACLU has not returned my phone call on this issue), researchers say the way sewage-based monitoring systems are designed makes it impossible to link individuals — whose genetic identifiers are mixed amidst the metabolites of interest — to specific pharmaceuticals, behavioral by-products, health conditions, and/or diseases.
However, they could tell you what cities and neighborhoods index high on these things, and it is not hard to imagine law enforcement authorities finding a reason to plug into this information. Or national intelligence agencies, perhaps?
Think about it.
Given that SCIM and other community-level biomonitoring techniques are fairly well established, it is astonishing that there is no systematic effort by U.S. cities, counties, states or the national government to use this valid, reliable, and non-intrusive technique for tracking the spread of the coronavirus.
We know the widely reported COVID-19 case numbers in the U.S. and worldwide are inaccurate.
“Inadequate knowledge about the extent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic challenges public health response and planning,” according to USC public health researchers who recently released an April study on the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies among adults in Los Angeles County, California. “Most reports of confirmed cases rely on polymerase chain reaction–based testing of symptomatic patients. These estimates of confirmed cases miss individuals who have recovered from infection,with mild or no symptoms, and individuals with symptoms who have not been tested due to limited availability of tests.”
“The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is a poor proxy for the extent of infection in the community,” one of the study’s researchers, Neeraj Sood, told the USC online news site.
For five months now, on a daily basis, our governments and worldwide news agencies have been reporting inaccurate numbers that do not give an unbiased picture of the coronavirus pandemic. They are bean-counting and they don’t know where all the beans are or which ones to count.
It did not need to be this way. We should have been analyzing our pee and poop from the beginning.
(There was no nice way to say that.)
K.R.K.
Send comments and stool samples to: kroeger98@yahoo.com or by tweet to: @KRobertKroeger1
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source NuQum.com, May 21, 2020)
Disclaimer: Though I address significant legal issues in this article, I am not a lawyer, only a concerned citizen and writer that places an extremely high value on our First Amendment rights — which I believe are under siege.
Is it illegal for a U.S. presidential campaign to obtain from a foreign source, by purchase or gift, derogatory information about an opponent?
But, before addressing this question, why am I even asking it? Aren’t we done with the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory? I’m as sick of the story as anybody. Let us move on.
Unfortunately, paraphrasing Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, the Trump-Russia story keeps pulling us back in.
What draws us back in this time? For a brief moment last week, Obamagate replaced the coronavirus pandemic in the headlines.
If you somehow missed the Obamagate story — and if you get your news from CNN or MSNBC, I’m not surprised (see the Appendix for a graph of cable news network coverage of the story) — let me give you a brief overview:
In early January 2017, as the FBI was about to end its counter-intelligence investigation into General Michael Flynn’s relationship with Russia based on finding no improper activities, FBI Director James Comey decided to keep it going long enough to interview Gen. Flynn regarding the contents of a December 2016 meeting between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In that FBI interview, conducted under oath at the White House, Flynn provided false information regarding the Kislyak meeting, and Flynn subsequently pleaded guilty to perjury (twice) with respect to his FBI interview.
So how did that become labelled as Obamagate?
Despite promising my therapist I would stop quoting comedian Jimmy Dore when discussing actual news, I’ve found a work-around. Here is comedian Joe Rogan’s retelling of Jimmy Dore’s summary of Obamagate:
“(Obama) was using the FBI to spy on Trump, and when it turned out that all that Russia-collusion stuff didn’t happen — and the Obama administration knew it didn’t happen —they still tried to turn it into something that it wasn’t.”
As a result, according to Trump allies, Gen. Flynn became one of the fall guys for a failed conspiracy theory originally concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Steele Dossier author Christopher Steele, but ultimately passed on to the Obama administration.
Whatever one’s partisan biases, indisputable is this fact: The Mueller investigation into a possible Trump-Russia conspiracy resulted in zero conspiracy-related indictments. All indictments generated by the investigation were process crimes (i.e., perjury) or ancillary crimes unrelated to Trump and Russia (e.g. Paul Manafort’s illegal financial activities).
Whether you agree or disagree with what Mueller’s team decided is not the point of this article. I will not re-litigate Russiagate. People have made up their minds and I’m fine with that.
But what I believe to be the central legal question of Russiagate — the procurement of opposition research (information) from foreign sources — remains unanswered.
Or is it?
The primary finding of the Mueller Report was that no compelling evidence exists suggesting the 2016 Trump campaign directly or indirectly conspired with any Russian entity to influence the 2016 election outcome.
One could argue (and I do) that the entire Russiagate controversy pivots on the events related to the acquisition of derogatory information regarding Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party (i.e., deleted and hacked emails).
With respect to the hacked emails, we now know from recently released closed congressional committee interviews that the evidence linking the Russians to the DNC and Podesta email hacks is less than conclusive. I will remind readers, however, that the National Security Agency (NSA) — the U.S. intelligence agency of record on cyber-intelligence issues — concluded with “moderate” confidence that the Russians were responsible for the DNC/Podesta email hacks. But that is a topic for another day. [Spoiler alert: I still think Russia-aligned actors hacked, at a minimum, the Podesta emails.]
Apart from the fact that the U.S. news media selects its stories based more on how well they serve a pre-selected narrative (“Trump is bad”) than on a story’s basis in fact, Russiagate brings to the fore the question of whether foreign-sourced information is allowable in a U.S. presidential election.
If the U.S. Constitution still matters, the answer must be ‘yes.’
Still, we must ask, is the manner in which this information obtained pertinent?
Of course it is. No U.S. presidential campaign is allowed to steal the emails or private communications of an opposition campaign. If Person A steals the emails of Person B and gifts them to Person C, Persons A and C are complicit in a prosecutable crime.
But that is not what happened in 2016, according to the Mueller Report and the publicly known facts.
The evidence Trump’s adversaries cite to demonstrate his conspiratorial activities with the Russians comes down to these seven events:
(1) Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya over possible “dirt” against Hillary Clinton.
(2) Trump associate Roger Stone’s interactions with Wikileaks prior to the release of the DNC/Podesta stolen emails (yes, there were stolen).
(3) Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’ boast to an Australian foreign diplomat that he had Russian contacts with knowledge about Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ deleted emails.
(4) Donald Trump’s own campaign stump speeches where he appeals to the Russians to release Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ deleted emails.
(5) General Michael Flynn’s private conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016.
(6) Former Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, sharing internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national with ties to Russian intelligence, according to the Mueller Report (Vol. I, p. 6).
(7) The Trump Organization’s pursuit of a Trump Tower project in Moscow concurrent with the 2016 presidential campaign.
Apart from process crimes (e.g., perjury) related to the FBI’s investigation of these events, not one of them warranted a criminal indictment by Robert Mueller’s special investigation.
Why didn’t Mueller’s team find at least one prosecutable conspiracy crime during their three-year investigation?
The most defensible answer is that such crimes didn’t exist.
Most supportive of the Trump campaign’s innocence is that none of the seven events listed above are in dispute by the participants, including the substance within those events.
“Several areas of the Office’s investigation involved efforts or offers by foreign nationals to provide negative information about candidate Clinton to the Trump Campaign or to distribute that information to the public, to the anticipated benefit of the Campaign.
The Office determined that the evidence was not sufficient to charge either incident as a criminal violation.”
However, by saying the “evidence was not sufficient” for an indictment, many of Trump’s critics are left howling at Mueller’s timidity. What more evidence did he need?
Though not sufficiently elucidated, the Mueller Report lays out the reasons for not pursuing a campaign finance violation against the Trump campaign, despite legal interpretations of campaign finance law broadly supporting bans on foreign-sourced “things of value” (Vol I., p. 187):
“These authorities would support the view that candidate-related opposition research given to a campaign for the purpose of influencing an election could constitute a contribution to which the foreign-source ban could apply.
A campaign can be assisted not only by the provision of funds, but also by the provision of derogatory information about an opponent. Political campaigns frequently conduct and pay for opposition research. A foreign entity that engaged in such research and provided resulting information to a campaign could exert a greater effect on an election, and a greater tendency to ingratiate the donor to the candidate, than a gift of money or tangible things of value.
At the same time, no judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law. Such an interpretation could have implications beyond the foreign-source ban, see 52 U.S.C. § 30116(a) (imposing monetary limits on campaign contributions), and raise First Amendment questions. Those questions could be especially difficult where the information consisted simply of the recounting of historically accurate facts. It is uncertain how courts would resolve those issues.” [Bolded emphasis mine]
Buried in a 400+ page report, deserving only one single sentence, Mueller’s team acknowledges that the criminalization of the “voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research…raises First Amendment questions.”
No kidding. [Pardon my sarcasm, but the central issue within the entire Russiagate brouhaha — the seeking of foreign-sourced derogatory information about a political opponent — was addressed in ONE sentence on page 187.]
I recognize that the average national journalist today doesn’t care about protecting First Amendment rights as their career doesn’t depend on protecting those rights. In fact, most seem happy to drop kick the First Amendment into the Potomac.
My evidence? Besides the fact I can’t name one mainstream U.S. journalist that questions why Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange sits in a British prison for publishing U.S. national security secrets (or abuses, depending on your point-of-view), I cannot find an example of a major U.S. news outlet having discussed with any depth Russiagate’s First Amendment implications.
Not a single one. Even Fox News and The Wall Street Journal have largely neglected this crucial aspect of the Russiagate story (The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberely Strassel being a notable exception).
How is that possible? Surely someone at the New York Times or Washington Post cares about First Amendment rights?
In contrast, the other side of the argument seems more than willing to piss on our constitutional protections if it means bringing down Donald Trump.
Nothing demonstrates the moral (and legal) low ground of Russiagateniks better than New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries admitting during Trump’s U.S. Senate impeachment trial that “payment” for foreign-sourced opposition research like the Steele Dossier is totally kosher.
If hypocrisy were an Olympic gymnastic event, Jeffries would get all 10s.
Watch and enjoy:
Asked whether, under the Dems' impeachment standard, the Clinton campaign's solicitation of the Steele dossier would be considered foreign interference, illegal, or impeachable, @RepJeffries says no — because the Steele dossier "was purchased." pic.twitter.com/SbEKFGNwM4
What Rep. Jeffries is trying to sell you is a diversionary truckload of legal nonsense. The distinction between paying for foreign-sourced opposition research and receiving it for free (for example, in the process of doing research) is most likely an artificial one, though admittedly untested in the U.S. courts (according to the Mueller Report).
That should have changed with Russiagate and the Mueller investigation, but it didn’t. Why not?
Because every D.C. lawyer knows the First Amendment allows the use of foreign-based sources — paid or unpaid — to collect information, derogatory or otherwise, on American political actors. It’s called journalism. It’s free speech, as in, protected by our Constitution. Mueller’s team knew challenging that right in a U.S. court would have had a flying pig’s chance of success.
It shall be unlawful for (1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make:
(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;
(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or (C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or
(2) a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national.
(b) The term “foreign national” means
(1) a foreign principal, as such term is defined by section 611(b) of title 22, except that the term “foreign national” shall not include any individual who is a citizen of the United States; or
(2) an individual who is not a citizen of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 1101(a)(22) of title 8) and who is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence, as defined by section 1101(a)(20) of title 8.
At the risk of over-simplification, Russiagate hinged on the definition of ‘other thing of value’ (in line a-1A): Wouldn’t “dirt” on Clinton qualify as something of value, thereby making its free acquisition from a foreign national an illegal campaign contribution by the Trump acquisition?
First, the Trump campaign never received any “dirt” on Clinton, so that is their first line of defense (though, in the case of the DNC/Podesta/Clinton emails, an attempt to procure stolen goods is potentially a criminal offense). Second, even if they had, the Mueller team conjectured (wrongly) that the Trump campaign’s legal jeopardy might be minimized if “the information consisted simply of the recounting of historically accurate facts.”
The U.S. legal history on defamation and First Amendment rights is too extensive and complex to retrace here, but suffice it to say the case law leans in favor of free speech and the press and generally forgives unintentional factual mistakes.
“Error is inevitable in any free debate and to place liability upon that score, and especially to place on the speaker the burden of proving truth, would introduce self-censorship and stifle the free expression which the First Amendment protects,” according to a 2012 Congressional Research Service analysis of U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment cases.
Even the Steele Dossier, despite having more in common with fiction writing than journalism, would likely be constitutionally protected.
Finally, adding to the protection of the Trump campaign’s 2016 activities (and the Clinton campaign activities also) is the Overbreadth Doctrine — a legal principle that says a law is unconstitutional if it prohibits more protected speech or activity than is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest. The excessive intrusion on First Amendment rights, beyond what the government had a compelling interest to restrict, renders the law unconstitutional.
One common cause of such an intrusion is a statute that using overly broad definitions and language. I’m not a lawyer, but the campaign finance statute’s use of concepts such as “other thing of value” would be ripe for an Overbreadth Doctrine challenge.
Final Thoughts
Nothing speaks to the self-inflicted lunacy of the political establishment Left than their willingness to embrace the Steele Dossier — an anti-Trump hit piece of mostly secondhand hearsay, possibly from Russian intelligence operatives (or, as they are frequently called in the U.S. media,“Kremlin insiders”).
And do you think anybody in the U.S. media went to the effort to independently verify the information in the Steele Dossier? Journalist Bob Woodward tried and in his words: “I could not verify what was in the Dossier.”
And that is pretty much where we stand today. The Mueller-led investigation into Russiagate punted on potentially the most consequential legal aspect of the story: Is it legal for a political campaign (or anyone, for that matter, as we are all protected by the First Amendment, not just journalists) to acquire from a foreign-based source any derogatory information about another political campaign.
The Mueller team plainly had an educated hunch that a court’s answer would be “yes, it is legal,” but decided to bury that important insight on page 187 of their report.
Thank God I didn’t fall asleep until page 192.
K.R.K.
Send comments and grand jury subpoenas to: kroeger98@yahoo.com, or tweet me at: @KRobertKroeger1
APPENDIX: Cable News Coverage of the Michael Flynn Story (5/6/20 to 5/19/20)
For the most part, only Fox News has consistently covered the Michael Flynn story over the past two weeks. Does that make it fake news? Discuss.
On a macro-level, Anthropologist Leslie White once wrote that human cultural evolution is the “process of increasing control over the natural environment” through technological progress.
He even proposed a simple equation, known as White’s Energy Formula, to summarize his neoevolutionist view:
C = ET
where E is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year, T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilizing the energy and C represents the degree of cultural development.
The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has shaken one of our most durable assumptions about human history: the near uninterrupted progress of human society over time.
Today, we live better than our parents, who lived better than their parents, who lived better than their parents…and on and on it goes.
If we view progress as our ability to produce greenhouse gases and consume heavily processed foodstuffs, we’re kickin’ it like never before. If we take a more comprehensive view of human happiness, however, the progress myth was never true.
As businessman Mark Cuban recently said: “I’m worth billions and I’m afraid to leave my damn house.” But that is just one manifestation of the coronavirus’ power over humans.
We live in the coronavirus’ world for now — and when will that end?
“The (corona)virus dictates the the timeline for lifting restrictions, not us,” said a New York epidemiologist on WNYC-FM last Friday.
Still, since the earliest stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts, bureaucrats, and politicians have hammered on the same basic message: We can control the coronavirus.
“We are not at the mercy of this virus,” said the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusat a March 9th media briefing. “All countries must aim to stop transmission and prevent the spread of COVID-19, whether they face no cases, sporadic cases, clusters or community transmission.”
The WHO Director followed up his press conference with a tweet:
At around the same time, Dr. Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote:
“The city of Wuhan, China, where Covid-19 started, waited weeks before acknowledging human-to-human transmission and taking measures to control it. Wuhan thus experienced an out-of-control epidemic that overwhelmed the health care system. The city felt these effects for weeks after intense control measures were in place, as newly infected people got sick and required care. Other cities in China watched Wuhan’s experience and imposed strict controls at a much earlier stage in their epidemic: They closed schools, sharply limited social contact, and traced and isolated cases and contacts. These early interventions dramatically slowed transmission. No other Chinese city has repeated Wuhan’s horrific experience so far.
These experiences…show that early and sustained imposition of measures to limit social contact will slow the epidemic. This is desirable for many reasons — fewer total people get infected in a slowly moving epidemic; those who do get infected do so later, on average, so doctors will have learned more about how to care for the illness, and antiviral drugs may even be available.
Most important in light of Wuhan’s crushing experience, a controlled epidemic has a lower peak, reducing the strain on health systems. From the perspective of disease control, every effort should be made, as soon as possible, to slow the spread of the virus and flatten the epidemic curve. If these interventions are not sustained, spread will resume, but every action to slow it buys us some time and probably reduces the total size of the outbreak.”
Within days of the WHO and Dr. Lipsitch statements — as well as from other public officials and epidemiologists around the world — the majority of the northern hemisphere rapidly implemented the core recommendations: (1) school and business closures, (2) lockdowns (‘shelter-in-place’), (3) travel restrictions, (4) social distancing requirements (e.g., masks, “the 6-feet rule”), (5) and the promulgation of stricter personal hygiene techniques (e.g., “20-second hand washing”).
Have these efforts worked? How would we know?
Is the U.S. (& the world) controlling the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)?
From the U.S. experience (so far), aggregated to the state-level, the data do not tell us which suppression and mitigation (S&M) efforts have been more effective than others.
Working against the data are numerous methodological issues: (1) states implementing multiple S&M techniques simultaneously (confounding factors), (2) vast majority of states (and all of the large, densely-populated states) implemented ‘shelter-in-place’ orders, though some states adopted this policy later than others (e.g., Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Kansas), (3) significant variation between states in how otherwise similar S&M techniques were implemented, and, most importantly, (4) the pandemic is not over in the U.S. by any stretch of the imagination.
Adding to these complications is this fact: the COVID-19 pandemic has included more than one coronavirus, with at least one being more contagious than others.
According to a recently released Los Alamos National Laboratory study, a new (mutated) strain of the coronavirus has become dominant in Europe and the U.S. East Coast and is potentially more contagious than versions that dominated China and the U.S. West Coast during the early stages of the pandemic.
If true, how can we compare New York and California’s response to the coronavirus if they are dealing with fundamentally different viruses?
It makes the analysis difficult — but not impossible. Studies using probability-based sampling are already in the field throughout the U.S. and when their results are available, more sophisticated statistical controls will better facilitate such comparisons.
In the meantime, we have U.S. county-level data from Johns Hopkins University (CSSE), updated daily, which continues to suggest four state-level factors are correlated with the spread and lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.: (1) Population density, (2) Testing incidence, and (3) Travel restrictions, and (4) an indicator for West Coast states (CA, HI, OR, WA).
See Figures 1 and 2 for a path model (mediation) analysis of the spread and lethality of the coronavirus in the U.S. at the state-level (through May 15th).
While only a state’s population density (per sq. mile) is significantly correlated both directly and indirectly with the number of COVID-19 deaths (per 1 million people), the total effects are significant for all four factors.
Figure 1: Path model estimates for COVID-19 deaths per 1M (output) and COVID-19 cases per 1M (mediator) for the U.S. through May 15, 2020.
Figure 2: Path model estimates for COVID-19 deaths per 1M (output) and COVID-19 cases per 1M (mediator) for the U.S. through May 15, 2020.
While researchers note that population density alone cannot explain many of the differences in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across the U.S. — for example, New York City and San Francisco are both densely populated but have significantly different morbidity and mortality rates — it is manifestly a major factor, if not the dominant factor.
As can be seen in Figures 3 and 4, the correlations of state-level population density and state-level COVID-19 case rates and fatality rates have increased over time, reaching in mid- to late-April an apparent threshold of 0.64 (Pearson coefficient) for cases and 0.72 for fatalities.
Figure 3: Correlation between COVID-19 cases (per 1M) and a state’s population density over time (U.S. state-level analysis; data through May 15, 2020).
Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
Figure 4: Correlation between COVID-19 deaths (per 1M) and a state’s population density over time (U.S. state-level analysis; data through May 15, 2020).
Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
To my eyes, this over-time convergence in the correlation coefficient for population density reminds me of how population parameter estimates in sample surveys converge as sample sizes increase.
As for the other variables in the path model, the significance of the West Coast-indicator confirms that something substantively different is happening in those states — be it the characteristics of the virus itself, the S&M policies of those states, or both.
Likewise, as has been the case since I first estimated models for U.S. state-level COVID-19 cases and deaths, those states that implemented internal travel restrictions on its citizens (AL, AZ, DE, FL, HI, ID, KS, KY, ME, MT, ND, NM, OK, RI, SC, TX, UT, VT, WV, WY) are experiencing significantly lower COVID-19 case incidences than other states, all else equal.
Overall, the path model explains about 75 percent of the state-level variance in COVID-19 case incidences and 85 percent of COVID-19 death incidences — all without any reference ‘shelter-in-place’ orders and their timing, which were found to be insignificant in this cross-sectional (i.e., one-point-in-time) analysis when included in the model.
Have the ‘Shelter-in-Place’ orders been ineffective? The state-level evidence is not clear on this question, though I feel some confidence in saying that broad, state-level “Shelter-in-Place’ orders have no statistically significant relationship with state-level case and fatality rates. Unless it is the location of a cluster outbreak, why should Wanakah, New York (Population 2,824) be under a state-ordered lockdown? I can’t find any justification in the data for such a policy.
But does that mean these orders didn’t help moderate the scale of the coronavirus pandemic? Absolutely not.
Imagine there is a parallel universe where New York didn’t institute a ‘Shelter-in-Place’ during the coronavirus pandemic. Do you think the end result would have been the same as in our universe? I don’t.
Unfortunately, we don’t have access to this parallel universe. We have only this one. And in this one New York suffered more than any other U.S. state during the coronavirus pandemic, even with a statewide shutdown.
But do not despair, the path model presented here offers strong evidence that states are far from powerless in addressing viral outbreaks, with testing rates being the most important controllable factor.
Still, the statistical evidence reminds that us that factors outside the control of political actors and subject-matter-experts — population density and a virus’ characteristics (contagiousness and lethality), including regional variations in those characteristics — explain a significant portion of state-level variances in case and fatality rates.
A state cannot easily control its population density or its location on a map and as this pandemic progresses over time, the impression I am left with is that states are becoming more similar, not different, in their COVID-19 case and fatality rates.
In other words, a state’s S&M strategies can definitely ‘flatten the curve,’ but these strategies may be more limited in their ability to change the eventual incidence rates in cases and fatalities.
Are we all going to end up like New York? Probably not, as we do have some control over the COVID-19 pandemic, though probably not as much as we want to believe. And when I say we, I mean our elected politicians.
Watching New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily press conferences on the coronavirus remind me of Billy Crystal’s catch phrase when doing his Fernando Lamas imitation on Saturday Night Live: It is better to look good than to feel good. [An analogous axiom I learned while working in the Federal Government may also apply:It is more important to look busy than to be busy.]
Governor Cuomo sure looks like he knows what he’s doing about the coronavirus, but the reality for New Yorkers is far different.
New York nonetheless leads the country in the relative number of COVID-19 cases (1,458 per 1 million people) and deaths (18,522 per 1 million people) and only New Jersey appears close enough to challenge New York for those two ignominious titles.
In all fairness, New York has seen its number of new cases and fatalities drop dramatically in the past two weeks:
New York is among only six states to see its current 7-day moving average in new confirmed cases fall below 25 percent of its peak. New York’s 7-day moving average peak in cases was 9,909 per day (on April 10th). As of May 15th, New York’s current 7-day moving average is 2,201 per day. The other states under 25 percent of their peak are: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, and Vermont.
New York is also among seven states to see its current 7-day moving average in new deaths fall below 25 percent of its peak. In New York’s case, its 7-day moving average peak in deaths was 951 per day (on April 12th). As of May 15th, New York’s current 7-day moving average is 234 per day. The other states to share this honor with New York are: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Vermont, and Wyoming.
Barring any major setbacks — which is possible given the virus might be in more control than we realize — New York is the only large-population state on those two lists. [Maybe I was too hard on Governor Cuomo earlier?]
Unfortunately, there is an equally long list of U.S. states that are currently at or near their peaks in COVID-19 cases and deaths (see Figures 5 and 6).
Figure 5: States at or near peak in new COVID-19 cases
Figure 6: States at or near peak in new COVID-19 deaths
Should the data make us optimistic or pessimistic?
Based on the data, I am promiscuous in my belief that the U.S. is on the downhill side of this first coronavirus wave (see Figure 7). As for future waves, there is no consensus among epidemiologists on the shape they will take, but there appears to be a consensus that they will occur.
Unfortunately, the worldwide trend in this first wave of COVID-19 cases is not declining (see Figure 8); but, it is a relatively flat curve, as opposed to a highly peaked one, suggesting mitigation and suppression efforts are working on some level.
Figure 8: Worldwide trend in new COVID-19 cases (as of May 18th)
My optimism also grows as we learn more and more about this virus, particularly about potentially controllable drivers of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality.
For example, a recent UK study found levels of Vitamin D in a population may affect how the coronavirus impacts a population.
“Vitamin D levels are severely low in the aging population especially in Spain, Italy and Switzerland. This is also the most vulnerable group of population for COVID-19,” concludes research conducted by Petre Cristian Ilie (The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Foundation Trust, King’s Lynn), Simina Stefanescu (University of East Anglia), and Lee Smith (Anglia Ruskin University). “We believe, that we can advise Vitamin D supplementation to protect against SARS-CoV2 infection.”
When this pandemic is finally over — and it will end, at the minimum when a reliable vaccine is available — epidemiologists will have the time to
What seems less debatable is whether we can control the coronavirus to our liking. That is not going to happen.
“We must be prepared for at least another 18 to 24 months of significant COVID-19 activity, with hot spots popping up periodically in diverse geographic areas. As the pandemic wanes, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to circulate in the human population and will synchronize to a seasonal pattern with diminished severity over time.”
In other words, the coronavirus remains in charge…until a vaccine is widely available.
K.R.K.
For data and statistical code used in this analysis, send requests to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 13, 2020)
Along with Doomcock, ThatStarWarsGirl, and Geeks+Gamers, YouTube vlogger Nerdrotic (aka Gary Buechler) is a member of the Praetorian Guard for George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise.
Though frequently mocked by the corporate-controlled entertainment media for their religious-like devotion to the Stars Wars myth, Star Wars is not their religion, it is their hobby.
Granted, they use religious terms like ‘canon’ to frame their critiques of how The Disney Company has fundamentally altered the Star Wars myth, but they do so to contextualize their uniformly negative reaction to the Disney Star Wars trilogy that was recently concluded with 2019’s release of The Rise of Skywalker.
They are fans of the Star Wars franchise. No more, no less.
The point of deepest contention between Disney Star Wars critics — sometimes called the Fandom Menace — and the mainstream entertainment media hinges on whether Disney should have respected Star Wars canon (i.e., historical precedent) when producing the trilogy and standalone movies (Rogue One, Solo).
“There has to be a basic foundation,” Buechler said in a recent live broadcast on YouTube. “(For Star Wars) Luke Skywalker was the hero that threw away his light saber to save his father (Darth Vader). He wasn’t going to go to the dark side. That was Luke Skywalker. ”
In contrast, Buechler considers the Disney trilogy’s rendering of Luke Skywalker as unrecognizable to the original character: “Luke Skywalker is not the one (in the Disney trilogy) who had a bad dream and was going to kill his nephew. His sister’s son. His best friend’s son.”
Buechler admits Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, and The Force Awakens/Rise of Skywalker director J. J. Abrams aren’t required to honor the fans, but if they want those fans to reliably show up for the Disney Star Wars projects, “they need to respect the love people had for that franchise.”
Unfortunately, says Buechler, the Disney people in charge of Star Wars have not demonstrated that respect.
Jeffrey Riley, a Nerdrotic YouTube follower, perhaps put it best: “Canon is history. If content loses its history, it stops existing.”
And how has Disney responded to these criticisms from fans? “Too bad, so sad,” seems to be their collective reply.
Matt Martin, a member of the Lucasfilm Story Group and creative executive for the animated Star Wars series Rebels, says of critics like Nerdrotic: “Canon is all fake anyway.”
If by ‘fake’ Martin means ‘fiction,’ there is no argument. Star Wars fans don’t consider the original Lucas-produced trilogy movies to be documentaries. They know these movies are science fiction.
Their message to Disney, instead, is that — as fans — they no longer recognize the Star Wars story line; and if Disney had wanted them to turn out in large numbers for the Disney trilogy movies, they would have considered the opinions of the Star Wars fan base.
For example, Han Solo’s unheroic death at the end of “The Force Awakens” represented the tipping point for me and Disney Star Wars movies.
Han Solo deserved better. And Star Wars stopped being fun.
However, for other Star Wars fans I’ve met who say they are done with Disney Star Wars, the cause of their divorce runs the gamut from Han Solo’s ignominious demise in The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker’s minor role in all three Disney trilogy movies, General Leia Organa’s demonstration of a previously unknown Jedi ability to fly in space without a spacesuit, to the use of light-speed in The Last Jedi to destroy the First Order’s Star Dreadnought.
Star Wars creator George Lucas has publicly complimented The Last Jedi’s director Rian Johnson for taking chances with the Jedi myth. Speaking on his behalf, director and close Lucas friend Ron Howard says, “He’s all for the galaxy expanding and experimenting. That’s what he prefers the most.”
‘Expanding and experimenting’ is one thing; taking a blow torch to the most basic precepts of the Star Wars mythology is an entirely different matter. Not even Lucas can get away with that in the eyes of some fans.
Feel free to mock Star Wars fans for caring about ‘fake’ canon, but if Disney is still a for-profit business — and Disney’s stockholders assume the company is — they should have done a better job understanding the core Star Wars fandom even if they didn’t want to cater exclusively to their desires and expectations.
Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Kathleen Kennedy probably has a similar quote.
Where did Disney go wrong with their Star Wars trilogy?
A minor dispute among Star Wars fans has developed over when and how the world’s most lucrative science fiction movie franchise started its slide. Was it by Rian Johnson’s canon-mocking The Last Jedi? Was it J. J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens? Was it the last movie in the trilogy — The Rise of Skywalker — that placed the Star Wars franchiseon life support? Or did the Lucas-produced prequels deliver the decisive blow long before Disney acquired the franchise?
While I can’t prove how the Star Wars franchise was damaged, I’m confident I know when it happened (see Figure 1): The Force Awakens caused Disney’s Star Wars troubles, not the more reviled Last Jedi.
Worldwide Google searches on the term ‘Star Wars’ have followed a predictable pattern since 2004 (the first year Google search data is available). In the month of a Star Wars movie premiere, Google searches spike, and then fall off until the next Star Wars movie (or until the next May the Fourth Be With You).
The assumption underlying my conclusion is that Google searches are a reliable and valid proxy for assessing public interest in media properties such as Star Wars. There is empirical evidence to support this assumption.
Figure 1: Worldwide Google searches on ‘Star Wars’ from 2004 to present
Had 2005’s Revenge of the Sith inflicted major damage to the Star Wars franchise, we would have expected the next Star Wars film (2016’s The Force Awakens) to have relatively deflated Google search totals. To the contrary, worldwide interest in Star Wars peaked leading into the release of The Force Awakens.
Revenge of the Sith is no longer a suspect, but what about The Force Awakens? — generally considered the best of the Disney trilogy movies (receiving a 93 critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
If we set 2016’s Rogue One aside as a unique case (it was a standalone Star Wars movie), and focus on the second Disney trilogy movie — The Last Jedi — the impact of The Force Awakens becomes apparent. Worldwide Google search interest in ‘Star Wars’ fell 55 Google Index points (where an index score of 100 represents the month with the most Google search interest in Star Wars).
Why?
Buechler theorizes Abrams’ unflattering deconstruction of the original saga’s protagonist — Luke Skywalker — and transforming Han Solo from a competent, space-savvy smuggler into a depressed, divorced dad did the critical damage.
Other Star Wars vloggers such as Doomcock have suggested the Disney saga protagonist — Rey — never became a fully-developed character on Luke’s level.
Regardless, the key point in Figure 1 is that blaming Star Wars’ decline on the visually impressive, but storytelling monstrosity — The Last Jedi — is misplaced. By the time of The Rise of Skywalker, public interest in Star Wars was60 Google Trends Index points below the similar period leading into The Force Awakens. Whatever the cause, Disney squandered their $4 billion Star Wars investment with a series of trilogy movies that alienated preexisting fans and created few new ones.
That is a recipe for a brand management disaster.
Fear not Star Wars fans. The franchise is wounded, not dead.
If I seem pessimistic about the future of Star Wars, let me share two reasons why Star Wars fans should remain optimistic: (1) Other popular culture franchises have survived mediocre middle acts, and (2) the world still thinks and writes about Star Wars more than any other science fiction movie franchise.
On the first point, the Tom Cruise-produced Mission: Impossible movie series suffered a mid-season slump only to come back stronger than ever. After two profitable, if unspectacular movies at the series start (released in the Summers of 1996 and 2000), the third Mission: Impossible installment (directed by J. J. Abrams oddly enough — Is there a pattern forming in his career?) was met with critical but not financial success (see Figure 2).
In the aftermath of Mission: Impossible 3, the franchise’s lowest grossing movie, Paramount Pictures could have easily pulled the plug on any future Mission: Impossible movies. The series seemed to have run its course.
Instead, Cruise brought in a new creative team (director Brad Bird and writers Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) and released Mission:Impossible: Ghost Protocol in the Summer of 2006 to wide critical praise and strong box office numbers. The two subsequent movies (Rogue Nation and Fallout) have been similarly successful and two more sequels are planned for release in 2021 and 2022. [Is there a harder working person in Hollywood than Tom Cruise?]
Figure 2:Mission: Impossible box office and production costs
The sustained success of the Mission: Impossible franchise can also be seen in Google search data (see Figure 3). From a Google Trends Index score of 55 in April 2006 (Mission: Impossible 3), the three subsequent releases have witnessed peak Google Trends Index scores of 78 (Ghost Protocol), 100 (Rogue Nation) and 88 (Fallout), respectively. Fallout’s figure, however, is deceiving as its spike in Google searches covered a two-month period (instead of one as for the other Mission: Impossible movies). Fallout is the highest grossing Mission: Impossible movie to date.
Figure 3: Google Search Interest in ‘Mission: Impossible’ (US, 2004 to present)
“All franchises have their implausibilities, whether it’s Transformers’ sentient cars or the Fast and Furious’ sentient Vin Diesels. But only the Mission: Impossible franchise has gotten better reviews with every installment, climbing its way up the Rotten Tomatoes rankings as though wearing electromagnetic gloves,” says Cruise biographer Amy Nicholson.
What has sustained Mission: Impossible’s success? Strong creative leadership from the producer/actor (Tom Cruise), screenwriters, and various directors utilized during the six-movie franchise.
Lucasfilm and Disney Strong creative leadership on the top-side has not been the case for the Disney Star Wars saga. But there is no reason why it couldn’t be going forward.
What should maintain Disney’s optimism is that the Star Wars franchise remains among the most talked about in all of popular culture. While Star Wars may have been surpassed in total box office by the Marvel Comics Universe movies, it is still a heavyweight among science fiction movie franchises when it comes to worldwide public interest (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Comparing Google Search Interest Across Science Fiction Franchises (Worldwide, 2004 to present)
Graph by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
Since 2004, Star Wars claims four of the Top 5 monthly Google Trends Index scores. The Marvel Comics Universe has the fifth ranked month (when Avengers: Endgame was released in April 2019).
Disney would obviously trade their high Google Trends Index scores for Endgame’s worldwide gross receipts. But Google searches do represent something tangible — public interest — and to this day Star Wars maintains a large reservoir of that across the globe.
The modest success of the Disney+Mandalorian series, a sparse story about a lone bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic, who takes on the responsibility of protecting a child of Yoda’s species in a post-Battle of Endor galaxy.
Star Wars fans will show up if you give them a good reason.
No, Star Wars is not dead. It isn’t even dying. But it is ill.
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 10, 2020)
One of my first market research jobs was at HBO (New York) in the late-1990s. About two months into the job, a personal assistant to HBO CEO Jeff Bewkes asked me to attend a 4 p.m. executive meeting.
At the time, I was heading the subscription cable network’s yet-to-be-launched “HBO-on-Demand” service and had been verbally abused that morning by the network’s chief financial officer for inconsistencies in my 5-year budget proposal.
The CFO hated subtotals that didn’t add up as much as I hated making them.
As I assumed the 4 p.m. meeting with Mr. Bewkes was to fire me, my office neighbor reminded me that Mr. Bewkes would never lower himself to fire someone at my level.
Typically at HBO firings at my level would consist of a security guard informing you of your termination and then escorting you out of the building. To the extent you saw anyone else, it would be colleagues diving back into their offices as you walk your box full of desk toys and family pictures to the elevator.
After some encouragement from colleagues, my optimism started to rise, though the morning’s tongue-lashing from the network’s second most powerful person was still fresh in my mind.
I don’t remember much about Mr. Bewkes’ office except that it was large, had an dark lacquered desk, and a nice view of Manhattan’s Bryant Park.
I also remember the chair I sat in, as it put me about a foot below Mr. Bewkes eye line and every time I shifted my butt, the leather seat would make a sticky squeak sound. Since I tend to shift a lot (adult ADHD), the noise annoyed everyone in the room, including myself.
After a few small-talk niceties between myself and the three or four other people in the room, none of whom were the CFO (thank God), Mr. Bewkes turned to me to explain why I was there.
“Kent, I appreciate the work you are doing on our on-demand service. I just wanted to get the senior people together who will be working with you on getting it up and running.”
It was a nice introduction.
What Mr. Bewkes said next I have never forgotten.
“I am told you have a market research background and that is exactly the type of person we want launching this new service. For HBO-on-Demand to be successful — and this is true for any media service — you must know and respect your core audience.”
And I did know HBO’s core audience: Young, educated, upwardly mobile professionals.
“I’m HBO’s core audience,” I said.
Mr. Bewkes’ immediate smile sent a jet stream of adrenaline into my system. I was going to nail this meeting. God yes. Director of HBO-on-Demand today. CEO of Time-Warner-Europe by Arbor Day!
“Good. Good,” he shot back.
Good? How about great!? (I didn’t say that, of course.)
Mr. Bewkes leaned back in his chair and paused for a moment. “How long have you been an HBO subscriber?”
Uh oh.
The truth was, at the time, only twice in my life did I have HBO service. The first was as a teenager when I hacked into my neighborhood’s cable TV hub and pirated the service for about a year. The second time was Spring 1997 when I moved into a New Jersey apartment and the service had been paid for through the year by the previous tenant.
Yep. I could feel the swamp water rising above my ankles.
“Since I was a teenager,” was my answer followed by some butt shifting, with accompanying sticky squeaks. “With maybe a couple of service breaks here or there.”
Good lesson in life: When anyone uses the word ‘maybe,’ it often means they are about to throw up a verbal smoke screen.
I prayed Mr. Bewkes’ inquisition about my subscription habits was over.
It wasn’t.
“I believe that if you don’t love the product you sell, you’re in the wrong business,” he said.
That makes sense. Let’s talk about HBO-on-Demand now, I thought to myself.
Mr. Bewkes, still leaning back in his chair, drew wry smile across his lips and asked, “What’s your favorite HBO show?”
My confidence made one final appearance that day. I knew the best answer to his question. It was the show Mr. Bewkes’ launched during his tenure at HBO — the show that heralded the subscription service’s move away from carrying only theatrical movies to providing exclusive, HBO-produced content.
“The Sopranos, of course.”
The Sopranos made Jeff Bewkes one of the most coveted media executives in New York at the time.
It may have been the best answer, but it wasn’t a truthful answer. I had never watched a complete episode of The Sopranos in my life. It was another trendy East Coast show not targeted to people from Iowa who listen to Kansas and the Dave Matthews Band and consider dinner at The Olive Garden or Red Lobster a nice night out.
“Don’t worry, this is not a test.”
But, of course, that is what someone says right before they give you…a test.
Mr. Bewkes turned to the other executives in the room: “I like focus groups. They don’t give you hard numbers, but they give you insights you can only gain from listening to people and seeing their eyes; you get a better perspective.”
Oh, crap.
Mr. Bewkes turned his gaze back to me: “Any favorite Sopranos character?”
Double crap.
“Tony and Big Pussy,” came out of my mouth as if by divine intervention.
Phew! Nailed it again. But please God, let the questions end, I thought.
“A favorite episode?”
OK, I was cooked.
More butt squirming. More sticky squeaking.
“I can’t come up with one right at the moment,” Even more butt shifting. And more glances between Mr. Bewkes and the other executives — but no wry smiling this time.
I will always be grateful to Mr. Bewkes for not going for the kill shot. He knew I was feeding him bull crap. Another butt-kissing young executive. But he had the decency to leave me with at least some thin slice of dignity. Not a lot — an earlobe’s worth.
I worked at HBO for about two more months.
What is the point of this story? I had two takeaways: (1) Don’t feed people verbal crap, and (2) know and respect your core audience.
I don’t follow Lesson 1 very well, but Lesson 2 has been my market research mantra ever since — and particularly useful in political polling research.
Mr. Bewkes understood the basic tenet of marketing: Know your customer.
Indeed, experiences after HBO caused me to augment Mr. Bewkes’ original maxim to include this simple rule: If you want to alter your product so you can expand or change your customer base, give your current core audience a reason to follow. Many won’t, but the more that do, the more likely your product’s new direction will succeed.
This isn’t rocket science — it should be common sense, you would think.
A female-centric Star Wars TV series?
The loosely organized internet mob, self-labeled The Fandom Menace, came out in full force in this past two weeks over a news story that Lucasfilm, headed by Kathleen Kennedy, was going to executive produce a ‘female-centric’ Stars Wars TV series.
Joe Otterson, who broke the story for Variety, reported that Leslye Headland — co-creator of the Netflix series Russian Doll, recently renewed for a second season — will be the showrunner for a new Star Wars series on Disney Plus.
The exact plot of this new series is not known other than it will be female-centered and occur in a different time period than the other Disney Star Wars projects.
The Fandom Menace on YouTube and Twitter quickly ambushed Disney and Kennedy, none more ferociously than the YouTube vlogger Doomcock — future ruler of Earth:
“In light of Hollywood going bankrupt, Disney fighting for its life, and theater chains going under, I thought Hollywood was going to pull its head out of its ass and actually get back to just making entertainment that people want to see. Apparently not. Hollywood hasn’t learned a damn thing…
They (Disney) have picked the wrong person to do this show and I’m not saying that lightly. (Headland) is a social justice warrior typhoon five on the sphincter scale…
(Kathleen Kennedy), you’re gonna turn away from the lesson that the Mandalorian should have taught you — that, when you make even a mediocre series like the Mandalorian, fans will forgive you and watch — and now you’re going to develop an explicitly female-centric series for Disney Plus…
Kathleen Kennedy strikes again. (She) is ramming her agenda down the throats of fans and she’s recruited the social justice warrior equivalent of General Patton to run an entire armored division of woke right down our throats.
I thought Disney was fighting for its life, not trying to take its own life?”
Legions of other Star Wars fans on social media (Nerdrotic, ThatStarWarsGirl, Geeks + Gamers) have voiced similar complaints about this new Star Wars series.
In general, while puzzled why Disney needs another ‘female-centric’ Star Wars project — wasn’t that what the new Disney Star Wars trilogy was all about? — the Fandom’s complaints are more focused on why Kennedy continues to green-light new Star Wars projects despite being responsible for the Disney trilogy debacle.
The capstone to the Disney trilogy — The Rise of Skywalker — was a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, stitched together so poorly even its director, J. J. Abrams had to confess the negative reviews had merit.
Visit the toy section in your local Target store. Disney Star Wars figurines and toys are sitting on the shelf: Untouched. Unloved. Unpurchased.
In a recent interview with Rebelscum.com, Chuck Terceira, President of Diamond Select Toys, a high-end collectibles manufacturer specializing in pop culture properties, said, “The overall demand for busts and Star Wars products is not what it was 10 or even 5 years ago.”
An interesting statement given that the start of the Disney Star Wars trilogy five years ago should have caused an explosion in demand for such collectibles.
There is an EF5-level storm in the science fiction franchise world right now. The most iconic franchises — Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who — are genuinely at risk of being shelved.
Less iconic science fiction franchises have already met their end: The Terminator, Alien, The Transformers. [In the latter case, we are grateful.]
I don’t expect to see a new Superman movie in my lifetime.
With the exception of the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) — which has the good problem of trying to match the success of its first phase movies which ended with the multi-billion dollar successes of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame — the other Sci-Fi franchises are struggling.
Why?
I don’t have the answer.
But I can show you the problem using worldwide Google search data obtained through Google Trends.
In the digital age, people can show interest in movie franchises in different ways. There are the traditional ways: go to a movie theater, buy a toy, watch a movie on TV. And there are new ways: Watch a movie on Netflix or some other premium service, download it from a file-sharing website, or stream it on your smartphone. And interest can also be shown simply by searching the internet for information about your favorite movie or franchise.
Google, of course, saves this information in the aggregate and offers it (for free) through Google Trends and other big data services they’ve developed (Google Ngrams is a personal favorite).
And it is the data service I recently used to plot public interest in the following Sci-Fi franchises since 2004: Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and the Marvel Comics (which I include for comparison purposes).
The results are not good news. All three of these science fiction franchises — Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who — are dying from self-inflicted wounds.
But don’t take my word for it. Look at the Google Trends data on the search habits of people worldwide regarding these franchises.
It’s not a happy story.
Google Trends for Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who (as well as Marvel Comics)
Let us start by describing what a healthy movie franchise looks like based on Google search behaviors, and the best comparison is the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU).
Figure 1 shows worldwide Google search behavior since 2004 on the word ‘Marvel’ using the Google Trends Index which ranges from 0 to 100, where 100 equals the monthly maximum across the analytic time period (Jan 2004 to May 2020). For example, searches on ‘Marvel’ reached a 16-year maximum in April 2019, the month the movie Avengers: Endgame was released. The next highest month for searches on “Marvel” was April 2018, the month Avengers: Infinity War was released.
Figure 1: Google search interest in Marvel Comics (Worldwide, 2004 to present)
Graphic by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
The key pattern in worldwide searches on “Marvel” is that they spike with each subsequent MCU movie release, starting with Iron Man in May 2008 through Avengers: Endgame. More importantly, and what distinguishes the MCU as a successful movie franchise, is that with each new MCU movie release, the level of “Marvel” searches increased over the previous movie release. The “peaks” in public interest for “Marvel” rise monotonically over time (i.e., never decreases).
In other words, Disney’s MCU franchise built fan interest and momentum over the course of MCU’s Phase 1 movie catalogue. That is what a successful movie franchise looks like; and while Figure 1 only tracks Google search behavior, this measure correlates strongly with the MCU movie worldwide box office receipts, as displayed in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Relationship between MCU Worldwide Box Office and Google Searches (Jan 2004 to May 2020)
Just in the core MCU movies alone, the MCU has grossed over $12 billion $US, unadjusted for inflation) for Disney/Marvel. Adding in the other MCU origin story movies and their sequels (e.g., Black Panther, Thor, Thor: The Dark World), the MCU catalogue has grossed over $22 billion worldwide. Compare that to the Star Wars movies which have grossed a healthy, but not MCU-level, $10.3 billion worldwide. And Star Wars isn’t even number two all-time — that honor belongs to the 12 Harry Potter movies at $9.2 billion in worldwide movie receipts.
STAR WARS
The MCU is the gold standard for movie franchises, an honor formally belonging to George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise.
To someone like myself, who in June 1977 caught pneumonia standing overnight in line at the Strand Theater so I could be among the first of my friends to see Star Wars (now titled Star Wars: A New Hope), relinquishing the box office title to the MCU has not been easy. But, as The Killers song says, “This is the world we live in.”
Further distressing for Star Wars fanslike myself has been the letdown of the Kennedy-produced Disney trilogy movies. There was so much hope among fans in December 2015 just before the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (helmed by J. J. Abrams).
The MCU was going to get some real competition from a new Star Wars saga (granted, both franchises are controlled by Disney, rendering a large element of the competition basically meaningless).
Figure 3 shows worldwide Google search interest for the term ‘Star Wars’ from 2004 to May 2020. The high point was December 2015 — which was a 9 percent increase over public interest during the month Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released (May 2005).
However, instead of generating interest in the Disney trilogy over time, Disney deflated it with The Force Awakens. Compared to the interest prior to The Force Awakens, interest in ‘Star Wars’ fell 76 percent leading into The Last Jedi and 86 percent prior to the release of The Rise of Skywalker.
Figure 3: Google search interest in Star Wars (Worldwide, 2004 to present)
Graphic by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
Wait, wasn’t it The Last Jedi that disappointed fans, not Force Awakens?
No.
The Google search data is uncompromising and clear: The Force Awakens killed public interest in Star Wars, not The Last Jedi. If The Last Jedi had been the culprit, the public interest spike in Star Wars leading into The Last Jedi would have been comparable to The Force Awakens. It was not even close.
Killing Han Solo as ignominiously as J. J. Abrams did and then marginalizing the Star Wars saga’s most important character — Luke Skywalker — was destined to anger Star Wars’ core audience. Why would Disney think otherwise?
Granted, Carrie Fisher’s death in December 2016 and the Last Jedi script leaks may have contributed to some softening in public interest in The Last Jedi, but those events are not comparable to the impact of a Star Wars movie itself.
The Force Awakens did the most damage to the Star Wars franchise.
As for the other two science fiction franchises I investigated in Google Trends — Star Trek and Doctor Who — they have witnessed similar declines in public interest.
In contrast to Star Wars and the MCU, I’ve limited my Google Trends analysis for Star Trek to the U.S and for Doctor Who to the U.K. as their fan bases have been mostly concentrated in the domestic markets of their origin.
We’ll start with Star Trek…
STAR TREK
Between 2004 and today, Google search interest in Star Trek peaked when the J. J. Abrams-helmed reboot of Star Trek debuted in May 2009 (see Figure 4). But, since the reboot, interest in Star Trek has been in a consistent decline — 38 percent lower for 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness and 63 percent lower for 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond.
Figure 4: Google search interest in Star Trek (US, 2004 to present)
Graphic by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
If you include the two CBS-produced Star Trek TV shows — Discovery and Picard — the downward “trend in peaks” for Star Trek has been steeper than for Star Wars, going from 100 on the Google Trends Index for the Star Trek reboot movie down to 19 for Picard.
Though the Google Trends data tells us little about why interest in Star Trek has declined, Star Trek fans on social media, especially those partial to the Prime timeline (i.e., The Original Series and The Next Generation) over the Kelvin timeline (started by J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek), are not reluctant to share their theories:
These complaints aren’t proof of anything but they capture the general sentiment I’ve seen and heard elsewhere across social media from the most vocal elements of the Star Trek fan base.
That overt sexist, racist and homophobic tirades are occasionally mixed in among otherwise cogent criticisms of the recent Star Trek projects should not detract from the more thoughtful Star Trek fans. It is an unfortunate feature of our social media ecosystem, but hardly the dominate one.
DOCTOR WHO
The last science fiction franchise I investigated was U.K.’s Doctor Who, a long-running TV series that ran from 1963 to 1989 in its first iteration, and then re-started in 2005.
For those unfamiliar, Doctor Who chronicles a time lord called “the Doctor” who travels through time in a space craft called the TARDIS — which looks like a blue British police box. One unique feature of the show is that the lead actor playing “the Doctor” changes whenever the time lord undergoes a “regeneration.” The result is that there have been 13 “Doctors” since the series started, 12 having been played by men, and the most recent being played by a woman, Jodi Whittaker.
Its hard to generalize every Doctor Who episode down to one sentence, but it might go something like this: “The Doctor,” a time lord, is accompanied by one or more human companions as they combat various alien foes in an effort to help people in need or to save past, present or future civilizations.
While I would characterize most Doctor Who shows as more lighthearted and cheeky than serious, some of the best episodes, particularly those when “the Doctor” says goodbye to a companion (or vice versa), can be profound and genuinely heart-breaking.
In other words, the show is very British: Smart. Sharply-written. Well-acted. And moves fluidly between humor and drama.
It is my favorite science fiction franchise. But I am fearful the show will not survive under its current writer (showrunner) Chris Chibnall.
We are fortunate that Google Trends goes back before 2005, the year of the Doctor Who reboot, so we can see the initial UK interest in the Doctor Who reboot (starring the underappreciated 9th Doctor Christopher Eccleston) through to the 13th Doctor (played by Whittaker).
Figure 5 reveals a number of interesting features of Doctor Who interest levels in the UK since 2004. First, interest in Doctor Who leading into the March 2005 reboot was relatively high (Google Trends Index =48) and grew with each new season’s final episode (i.e., “a rising trend in peaks”), climaxing in June 2008 with the Russell T. Davies-penned episode, “Journey’s End” — an episode marking final regular appearance of the Doctor’s very popular companion Donna Noble.
Figure 5: Google search interest in Doctor Who (UK, 2004 to present)
Graphic by Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com)
The revival of Doctor Who under Davies’ creative leadership is a textbook example of how to (re)build a science fiction franchise — superior writing, extremely likable actors, and respect for the long time Doctor Who fans who generated the initial excitement prior to the March 2005 reboot. “Know and respect your audience.”
That doesn’t mean a franchise can’t innovate and even violate previously established “canon,” as Davies did when the 10th Doctor short-circuited a regeneration process in order to create a clone of himself.
The problem for the Doctor Who franchise appears to have started following the transition from the 11th Doctor (played by Matt Smith) to the 12th Doctor (played by Peter Capaldi). During Matt Smith’s tenure as the Doctor, Google search interest peaked in November 2013 with the episode “The Day of the Doctor” in which David Tennant, reprising his role as the 10th Doctor, appeared along with the 11th Doctor.
In terms of public interest in the UK, the premiere of the first female “Doctor” (Whittaker) exceeded that of the March 2005 reboot, achieving a Google Trends Index score of 58. Unfortunately, its been downhill from there for Doctor Who and showrunner Chibnall. The last season ending special (December 2019) achieved a Google Trends Index score of 30, the lowest of any season ending Doctor Who episode.
What happened?
I think the best explanations of Doctor Who’s current death spiral comes from those defending the Chibnall-era shows:
I suspect “Steve” is not a Doctor Who fan. Prior to Chibnall, Doctor Who was not political, even as its core theme has always been the defense of the defenseless and dispossessed. That is not a “liberal” agenda, even if “liberals” think it is.
Pre-Chibnall Doctor Who avoided politics for the most part — and in the era of hyper-partisan, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea if you want to build a large audience. The MCU would not be as popular as it is had it decided to use its movie franchise to preach about border walls, privilege and the patriarchy. [Yes, I know Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, supported an Earth shield to protect us from hostile aliens and Captain America didn’t. That issue occupied maybe 10 minutes of a 22-movie franchise.]
The extent to which hot-button issues like racism or sexism were ever addressed on pre-Chibnall Doctor Who, it was done irregularly, and when addressed, done well. That is in stark contrast to the kitschy, two-dimensional way Chibnall handled the 13th Doctor’s Rosa Parks episode (“Rosa,” airing October 2018). If you want to see a superior time treatment of Rosa Parks’ historical significance by a science fiction show, watch the Quantum Leap episode “The Color of Truth — August 8, 1955.” [And I’m not a fan of Quantum Leap.]
‘Wokeness’ seems to inspire bad writing and I wonder why. Perhaps because, nowadays, it is too easy get such scripts approved or through the creative process without significant editing? I do not know.
All I know is that in the case of the three science fiction franchises I value the most — Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who — ‘wokeness’ is turning off their core audiences in droves. And, no, these franchise defectors are not all Donald Trump supporters.
Know and respect your audience
Jeff Bewkes didn’t invent the ‘know-your-audience’ principle. Its pretty rudimentary to any understanding of business marketing. But sometimes the easy lessons are the hardest to internalize and sustain. Our lives all tend towards complication, not simplicity.
And, in taking over the Star Wars franchise, Disney and Kathleen Kennedy committed the worst blunder of all: they alienated their core audience with a story line that was never going to attract a new audience. They killed Han Solo (who was a shell of his old-self) in the least heroic way possible — as a depressed, divorced dad. They took the franchise’s protagonist — Luke Skywalker, the courageous hero of the whole Lucas-inspired saga — and turned him into a feckless nag with not even the courage to help his sister Leia fight off the new looming menace, the First Order.
And they were going to make Leia, not Luke, the true hero of the Skywalker saga? When (God rest her soul) Carrie Fisher was is no condition to carry the Star Wars franchise in this new direction. Kathleen Kennedy and J. J. Abrams had to know that.
Disney seemed to be begging long time Star Wars fans not to show up for the new trilogy.
A friend recently described first generation Star Wars fans as “50- and 60-something divorced men who say ‘got’ a lot and still call flight attendants ‘stewardesses.’ Kennedy was never going to make a movie for them.
The trouble with that thinking is its inaccuracy. Star Wars fans, like science fiction fans, are misunderstood. They are mainstream entertainment consumers — a multi-billion dollar consumer segment split evenly between men and women and drawn from all age, income and racial/ethnic categories.
An entirely new generation of fans, whose first contact with Star Wars was the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars or the Lucas-produced prequel movies, now attend fan conventions in near equal numbers to the first generation fans.
In a 2014 survey of science fiction convention attendees, a subset of science fiction movie fans, the gender breakdown overall was 54 percent male to 46 percent female, but almost even for fans age 30 or under.
Science fiction is mainstream, which is why I understand Kathleen Kennedy and Leslye Headland’s belief that they can create a successful female-centric Star Wars series. There is a potential audience for such a show.
I just don’t believe Kennedy, Headland, or corporate Disney, based on how they butchered the Skywalker saga, have a bloody clue how to do it.
But I also believe Disney will find a way to revive their $4 billion dollar initial investment in Star Wars. Disney always finds a way. Disney marketing since Steamboat Willie has perfected the art of bludgeoning us to the point where we can’t get enough of Disney’s homogenized, entertainment caboodle.
Unfortunately, the other two Sci-Fi franchises — Star Trek and Doctor Who — are dead men walking.
They had great runs, but as George Harrison once sang, all things must pass.
My personal view on why these Sci-Fi franchises are teetering
My first science fiction loves were the British series Doctor Who (introduced to me when Tom Baker played the fourth doctor in the mid-70s and early-80s) and Star Trek (The Original Series).
If things look bleak for Star Wars (though I believe Star Wars will rise again, despite the mediocrity dominating the Disney output so far), the prospects for the Star Trek and Doctor Who franchises are even grimmer.
In both cases, TV ratings for their newest iterations are at or near historic lows, leading some long time fans to also point fingers at the showrunners and executive producers of these franchises for forcing their political agendas into show scripts, instead of good, solid science fiction stories.
In the case of Doctor Who, the thirteenth and latest doctor, Jodi Whittaker, is the first female doctor, which was largely met with positive reactions from fans. Not sitting well with many Doctor Who fans (including myself), however, is the writing that has dominated Chris Chibnall’s two-year tenure as the showrunner (and he’s slated to return for a third). Where once Doctor Who episodes emphasized the science in science fiction (often dealing with time travel), the Chibnall produced shows descend into didactic, high school civics class-level moralizing.
Star Trek has suffered a similar fate under the leadership of CBS TV Studio’s Alex Kurtzman. Where Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry evoked an optimistic, inclusive image of our future, the newest Star Trek properties paint a bleak future. If the Road Warrior and Logan had a baby, it would be Star Trek: Picard. [That isn’t a fair characterization. Road Warrior and Logan are two of my favorite dystopian-genre movies of all time. Those are great movies. Picard is not a great TV show — just a dispiriting one.]
And then there is the colossus of science fiction movie franchises — Star Wars.
George Lucas changed fundamentally what movies are made and how they are made. Hence, the franchise’s possible demise may do the same.
When a movie like The Rise of Skywalker can cost up to $300 million to make and still be considered a “failure” after grossing over $1.3 billion worldwide, you know there is a structural problem in Hollywood.
I also believe that computer-generated-imagery (CGI) has hurt science fiction movie making as much as helped. I think that’s why I’ve always drifted towards TV shows like Star Trek (The Original Series) and Doctor Who. They are story and character-driven, not special effect-driven.
I suppose its my age that causes this feeling, but I’ve seen my son and his teenage friends watch these movies and, more often than not, they look bored.
Do you know what they like? They like funny characters and funny dialogue. They good writing reinforced by good acting and editing.
I thought Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 had some of the most amazing CGI I have ever seen. The movie’s nemesis, Ego, played by Kurt Russell, lives on a planet that in the IMAX format literally took my breath away.
To my son and his friends, those amazing graphics in Guardians were white noise. When I ask them what they thought of the CGI and special effects, I get answers like: “They were OK.” “Good.” “Cool.” “The Last Jedi was better.”
When they talk among themselves about movies like Guardians, they talk about the characters. The funny lines. Even the CGI-heavy battle scenes are remembered, not by the explosions, but through references to characters’ one-liners (such as Guardians’ Yondu: “I’m Mary Poppins y’all!”)
They crack up laughing every time Drax calls Mantis ugly (if you are not familiar with Guardians, Mantis happens to be very attractive).
Fun dialogue. Good actors. Decent storytelling. Swift pacing. Those are the core elements that form the secret sauce for building lasting science fiction franchises. Star Wars had it. Star Trek had it. And Doctor Who had it.
Have you watched any of those franchises recently?
Here is my one-minute summary: Women are, by nature, good (see the Disney Star Wars trilogy). Some men are good, but stupid (see Solo, Picard or any Doctor Who episode from the 13th doctor’s first season). The other men are bad and also stupid (see any Doctor Who episode from the 13th doctor’s second season). Bad women are bad because of bad men (see Birds of Prey). And everyone is sexist, racist and privileged…except women (watch any hour of MSNBC).
That is why these franchises are dying. Even women don’t want to watch that patronizing crap. People are numbed by the incessant preaching and scolding that defines the most recent Doctor Who episodes. They are depressed by the dystopian future offered by shows like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.
Science fiction movies used to be fun. And even when they were serious or scary (e.g., Aliens), they were still fun.
Not any more.
If Disney wants a successful female-centric science fiction franchise, they should create a new one. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry didn’t want to make The NewAdventures of Buck Rogersfor a reason: Buck Rogers wasn’t his idea. Instead, he created a new franchise — Star Trek — and changed science fiction entertainment forever. George Lucas and Star Wars even more so. And no science fiction franchise will be as smart as Doctor Who. All three are original ideas created by creative people.
But if the data I’ve presented here are telling, these franchises are done.
I will miss them.
K.R.K.
Requests for data used in this article can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com
Final note: I apologize for not answering all constructive comments and requests sent to me. There are just too many, but I will continue to try.
