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It would be interesting to apply Dictator’s Handbook lens to this and determine actual extent of power. For example India is nominally a liberal democracy, but Modi probably has tactics available to him that democratically elected leaders generally don’t.
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One of the difficult questions is: assuming there really is a “cost of democracy” holding tech-level constant, should you be personally willing to pay it? Can’t honestly answer that without normalizing for your relative safety as a function of class/wealth.
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I’m totally willing to accept a 10x-100x higher fatality rate (on a low base like 0.1- 1%) for higher civil liberties but then I’m not most at risk from poverty, crowding etc. Healthcare workers at least knowingly sign up for a risky profession.
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Hmm. Would you, in the wake of this, vote for a measure making forced group quarantine an emergency power, weakening habeas corpus in situations well short of martial law? I honestly don’t know.
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If you could be administered a medical test against your will, by people who have entered your house without a specific warrant, and taken away to quarantine, would you be okay with that? I think it’s technically feasible in the US right now only under martial law right? 🤔
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So... the case that per capita is meaningless because outbreaks are scale free. I’m not sure I buy this. You can’t just assume scale-free based on lack of correlation. A country is a logistics/travel connectivity cluster, not a meaningless fiction.
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A quick chart for those who keep asking for per-capita adjustment: Here’s population vs total death toll one week after 10th death. No relationship. As I’ve been saying, population does not affect pace of spread. All per-capita figures do is make smaller countries look worse.
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I think the way to combine cluster analysis and country analysis is some notion like mean-free-path. The right unit of analysis is neither the “country” nor the “outbreak cluster” but something else. Populations are not structureless Petri dishes. They gave a mobility topology.
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I’d buy the scale free argument if cities were large open spaces within walls where people all just stood still 3 feet apart and virus was jumping like a wildfire through a forest. No. We move, at varying speeds, through striations. The connectivity matters.
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Per capita is likely a terrible way to control for country effects, but country effects must exist and show up if modeled right. Wuhan and New York are both important economic hubs with a lot of travel for example.
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Maybe the right way to adjust is to Ignore country boundaries but segment graph of air travel and road travel connectivity bandwidth by a min-cut/max-flow logic, to define de facto “logistics countries”. This would make Seattle part of an Asian hub, NY part of an EU hub.
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Add an MLM attribution logic. Wuhan gets a fraction of the case count of all 1-degree removed air linked cities, regardless of country they’re in. Recursively back from newest hubs. Many big cities are better connected to international trading partners than national hinterland.
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Idea for a graph theory project: use the flight connectivity data and dates of travel restrictions to construct city-clusters that should be treated as “Covid19 nations”
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