Jay P. Greene's Blog

Those who suffer with PLDD, which The Higgy is meant to (dis)honor, try to boss other people with the delusion that doing so benefits those being bossed around. It doesn’t really matter whether the bossing is based on something true or false. It’s all for a good goal, so that justifies everything. This is probably what Peter Daznak was thinking when he organized a group letter of public health experts to The Lancet in February 2020 asserting that considering the possibility that Covid originated from a lab leak was dangerous conspiracy thinking and needed to be squashed. As Matt noted in his nomination, those who signed the letter didn’t know then and probably still don’t know now whether Covid originated from a lab or the wild.

In some ways, they didn’t really care whether it was true or false as long as the letter achieved something that they thought was good. That good might be maintaining positive relations with the Chinese government, getting stronger cooperation from China with global health organizations to combat the virus, avoiding the possibility that people would wrongly blame Chinese individuals for collective responsibility for any leak, avoiding scrutiny of the EcoHealth Alliance’s relationship with the lab in Wuhan, or some other thing they valued. When people do bad things, they can almost always rationalize to themselves that they are doing something good.

But the path to the Higgy is paved with good intentions. Once we abandon standards of truth-telling and acknowledging uncertainty, we develop the over-confidence required to boss others around and are prey to the self-delusion that whatever we want must be good for others. We don’t know Peter Daznak’s heart. But we do know that he organized an effort by self-interested experts to delegitimize reasonable inquiry into the origins of the Covid virus.

We highly doubt that the confident assertion that the lab leak theory was a crazy conspiracy achieved any of the good things Daznak and his colleagues may have imagined. But it is more likely that using their expert status to stymy reasonable inquiry may have made discovering the truth impossible and may have shielded those responsible from accountability. That accountability is not merely a matter of justice, which is important in its own right, but may help avoid future global-level catastrophes through deterrence and improved practices.

For this abuse of expert status to boss around others with recklessness about the truth, Peter Daznak is this year’s recipient of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award.

Daznak beat two other worthy nominees: Jennifer Dorow (nominated by Greg) and Yusuke Narita (nominated by me). Dorrow was certainly self-absorbed and destructive in her behavior by refusing to yield to another candidate from her party who stood a better chance of winning. But her self-absorption is not so much derived from the desire to boss around others (like a PLDDer) as from the regular politician desire to be the one receiving attention. It is still blame-worthy but not obviously PLDD to want to win a nomination even when one is not the best candidate for the party.

Narita is more like Daznak in that he uses his expert status to try to boss around others. But unlike Daznak, it is very unlikely that anyone is likely to listen to Narita other than the few dozen grad students in the Yale econ program compelled to take his courses and maintain his favor by agreeing with him. Daznak was more effectively mobilizing government officials to dismiss lab-leak investigations. That effectiveness made Draznak more worthy of The Higgy.

Daznak joins past “winners” of The Higgy: Abraham Flexner, Alison Collins, Mark DiRocco, Kosoko Jackson, John Wiley Bryant, Plato, Chris Christie, Jonathan Gruber, Paul G. Kirk and the incomparably petty inaugural winner, Pascal Monnet.

(Guest post by Matthew Ladner)

On February 19, 2020 a group of 27 public health officials published a joint letter in the medical journal Lancet that read in part:

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.

This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.  We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.

We invite others to join us in supporting the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of Wuhan and across China. Stand with our colleagues on the frontline

We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.

Competing interests were not declared, rather they were concealed.

I should note from the outset that I do not know whether COVID-19 originated in wildlife or in a lab. Neither do those who signed on to the letter, either today or back in 2020. Wuhan has both a wet-market and a laboratory that conducted experiments on bat viruses, and one of these two things is far more common in Chinese cities than the other and the pandemic started in (checks notes) Wuhan. Only someone deep in the throes of delusion inspired by self-interest or an utterly unsophisticated dupe would not want to explore the possibility of a lab leak.

Peter Daznak drafted the first draft of this letter, and an analysis found that 26 of the 27 original signatories had ties to the EcoHealth Alliance. After the publication of this letter, Daznak was appointed to a commission to explore the virus origins by Lancet and on another organized by the World Health Organization. Later he was removed from both. Sleuthing revealed that EcoHealth had made grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for experiments on bat viruses, that EcoHealth had engaged in some heavily criticized lobbying of the National Institute of Health officials in order to skirt rules specifically designed to prevent a pandemic, and that multiple safety concerns had been raised by Chinese officials regarding the security of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Some of the signatories later said that it had been their intention to push back on the notion that Chinese officials had released the COVID-19 virus on purpose. You’d have to be a Roger Moore era Bond Villain to do such a thing and you’d be needing an incredibly reliable vaccine to create your post-pandemic utopia on the ashes of the old world, which China shows no sign of having. Allegedly Daznak himself insisted on keeping the statement “broad” in denouncing a lab origin.

The first paragraph in the above quote is really a piece of work- a true masterpiece of licking the boot stomping of a human face forever. Chinese officials were anything but “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data.” For instance as Annie Sparrow related in Foreign Policy:

Instead of notifying the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of atypical pneumonia and evidence of human spread, the authorities censored information, concealed the virus, and silenced doctors who tried to warn their colleagues. Hospital leaders refused to authorize masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE) on the grounds that it would cause panic. As patients infected health care workers and health care workers infected one another, hospital leaders insisted that spread among humans was impossible—that no staff members were infected—even altering diagnoses that suggested otherwise.

Beijing’s official line through Jan. 19, 2020 was that the outbreak began in late December 2019, that all cases had been infected by an unidentified animal source at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and that no health care workers were infected. But even when the government conceded human spread on Jan. 20, it reported only a fraction of the real numbers.

…

Instead authorities engaged in a pattern of demonstrable lying and covering up, threatening doctors involved in early warnings and restricting information. On Jan. 3, 2020, when China formally acknowledged the pneumonia outbreak, authorities told the WHO they had no idea what was causing it. In fact, by then, the new coronavirus had been sequenced several times—beginning with Vision Medicals on Dec. 27, 2019; BGI Genomics on Dec. 29, 2019; Wuhan Institute of Virology on Jan. 2, 2020; and China’s CDC on Jan. 3, 2020. On Jan. 5, a consortium led by professor Zhang Yongzhen at Fudan University in Shanghai sequenced it, deposited it in GenBank, the U.S. public database of DNA sequences, submitted it to Nature, and shared it with China’s National Health Commission (NHC).

This letter is Exhibit A of the abuse of scientific “authority” and why many of us have drawn the unavoidable conclusion that grandees and technocrats are not to be trusted. Oh, and in addition his sketchy grant-making and lobbying may have been a single step upstream from causing a global pandemic that killed millions of people and damaged the lives of millions more. I am not certain about that last part, just that there was an obvious effort to cover up the investigation of the possibility of a lab leak through the abuse of authority. It is therefore my distinct pleasure to nominate Peter Daznak for the Higgy.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Some are born PLDD, some achieve PLDD, and some have PLDD thrust upon them.

As 2022 dawned, Jennifer Dorow was an obscure Wisconsin judge. Then she had the good luck, and the rest of us had the bad luck, to have a sensational, nationally watched mass-murder trial of a black nationalist who said Hitler was right to kill Jews and sympathized with the extremist “Black Hebrew Israelites” land in her courtroom.

Dorow clearly loved the spotlight, but her conduct of the trial was incompetent, as she repeatedly made irresponsible statements about the defendant’s courtroom conduct. While the defendant’s conduct in court was indeed outrageous – refusing to answer to his own name and regularly interrupting the judge, for example – Dorow’s unguarded comments attacking him went well beyond what was necessary to maintain decorum in her court.

Dorow’s inability to control herself could have opened up the defendant’s eventual criminal conviction to complications in the public eye, not to mention the appeals courts.

It seems Dorow just could not do her job, which was to maintain her composure and follow proper judicial procedure when deeply evil and unhinged people break the court’s rules. She seems not to have been able to prioritize the integrity of the court above her own sense of wounded pride in the face of her inability to control others.

Fortunately for Dorow, and for the criminal justice system, the defendant was so obviously guilty, and his courtroom conduct was so offensive to the jurors, that he was convicted in spite of Dorow’s incompetence.

But Dorow had tasted the spotlight, and wanted more.

The mass-murder trial had given her huge quantities of what is unfortunately called “earned” media. She began looking around for a way to leverage the trial publicity to advance herself.

So when Wisconsin had an election for a seat on the state supreme court this year, Dorow jumped into the race. Her conduct in the campaign continued to show both her incompetence and her growing signs of PLDD.

You will think I’m making this up, or at least exaggerating, but this is the stone-cold fact: At her first debate in the election, Dorow showed up with a binder full of answers.

Throughout the debate, whenever she was asked a question, she turned to the appropriate page and read her answer verbatim out of her binder.

Unfortunately, in spite of her constantly demonstrated incompetence, her much larger “earned” media profile allowed her to take the endorsements and the donations of many short-sighted, media-chasing political constituencies away from her main opponent on the Right, distinguished jurist Dan Kelly (a former professional colleague of mine).

Kelly, because he was the superior candidate on every metric other than who had presided over a national media-sensation murder trial, beat Dorow in the first phase of the two-phase election. But it was a long and bruising fight, and with massive pro-abortion money pouring into the state to fuel his general-election opponent, Kelly couldn’t come back.

Dorow’s PLDD appears to have cost the Right the most expensive judicial election in history.

But 2023 isn’t over. We can still give Dorow the victory she craves.

I nominate Jennifer Dorow for the 2023 William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award.

Image HT PBS Wisconsin

Yusuke Narita is a tenure-track economics professor at Yale with an impressive pedigree. He received his PhD from MIT, where he was mentored by Nobel Prize winner, Josh Angrist, and John Bates Clark Medal winner (which is often seen as a precursor to the Nobel), Parag Pathak. He has also frequently co-authored research with these prize-winning economists as he makes his way toward tenure at an Ivy League institution. But we at JPGB have developed a healthy skepticism of high status prizes, noting for example in our justification for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award that “the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.”

In the case of Yusuke Narita, it also appears that his high-status credentials are not consistent with high-level virtue. Narita became infamous earlier this year when it was revealed that he had been advocating for mass suicide among older people in Japan as a solution to their growing demographic problem. According to the Daily Mail:

A Yale University professor has sparked outrage by suggesting the only way to deal with Japan’s rapidly aging population is a mass suicide and disembowelment. 

Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, defended his views in a New York Times profile this weekend after he made the remarks on a streaming news program in 2021.

‘I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,’ he said at the time. ‘In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?’…

Narita told the New York Times he was ‘taken out of context’ but he has also said that euthanasia could become mandatory in the future, his comments forcing a backlash nonetheless. 

He claims that this would allow younger generations to make their way in business, politics and other aspects of society that the older generation refuses to leave. 

The Daily Mail continues:

Narita was asked to defend his views in a class earlier this year and did by showing a clip from the 2019 film Midsommar, in which a cult forces an older member to jump off a cliff. 

‘Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,’ Narita said. ‘So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.’ 

There’s a term for mandatory euthanasia, and it isn’t mass suicide. It’s mass murder. But when you are a high status researcher, some people feel liberated from the constraints of common morality. These people imagine that they are guided by reason and science, not ignorant moral tradition, so they are free to pursue their “big thoughts” that regular people just aren’t smart enough to appreciate.

If flirting with mass murder was not enough, Narita has a recent paper in which he and a co-author run a series of sophisticated empirical models that “all show that democracy persistently causes worse outcomes in this century. The median estimate among our five IV strategies is that a standard deviation increase in the democracy level causes a 2 percentage point GDP decrease per year in 2001-2019 (50% of the outcome mean) and a 1.8 percentage-point GDP decrease in 2020 (40% of the outcome mean). Democracy also causes more Covid-19 deaths in 2020, with a median estimate of a 350 increase in Covid-19 deaths per million (120% of the outcome mean) per a standard deviation increase in democracy. To facilitate interpretation of the findings, the political-regime difference between China and the US is equivalent to a three standard deviation difference in the democracy index.”

Step aside Thomas Jefferson. Yusuke Narita has put on his lab coat and analyzed the data to show that democracy harms GDP growth and kills people in pandemics. If Narita had a proper education — rather than a narrow training in context-free causal model designing — he might know that democracy has long been denounced as counter-productive for economic growth and hindering effective governance, and those denunciations have been proven mistaken by history (even if not by a 5 IV model). The Soviets claimed to have cracked the code for rapid industrialization and high GDP growth, which helped them recruit many Third World countries to communism. But that rapid industrialization and high GDP growth proved to be grossly over-stated and unsustainable, leading eventually to the collapse of communist economies by the end of the 1980s. A well-educated scholar might suspect that Chinese GDP and Covid data might similarly be unreliable and any short-term advantages are likely to prove unsustainable, but Narita got his doctorate in economics from MIT. And even by the rules of his narrow MIT training, a proper scholar would doubt the exogeneity of his 5 IVs and suspect that his model is not truly causal.

When NYT columnist, Thomas Friedman, tries to shape public policy based on what his taxi driver tells him, it is easy to reject Friedman’s advice because his method of consulting taxi drivers lacks scientific authority. But when Ivy League economists run sophisticated models to tell us that democracy is harmful or that we need to encourage mass suicide among old people, they have cloaked themselves in the authority of science and it gets more difficult for people to reject their advice. No one wants to be accused of being a “science denier.”

Like the eugenicists of the 1920s, falsely invoking science helps spread bad ideas by making them feel modern and fashionable and by making opponents seem backward. Economists are increasingly the priestly class of our modern age, giving them undue influence over policy discussions. Over-claiming based on bad models with bad data has made too many of them PLDDers, bossing everyone else around with their false invocation of science. Yusuke Narita may be a perfectly fine person in other regards. He may be kind to his mother and love his cat, but he sure seems to have a bad case of PLDD and for that he is a worthy nominee for The Higgy.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Higgy, like its recipients – including 2016 honoree Chris Christie, whom no one would blame you for not remembering – has a long tradition of existence. But while we’re glad The Higgy exists, we’re not glad its recipients do – in fact, we’re glad The Higgy exists because we’re not glad its recipients do.

Alas, Higgy winners, who seem to exist solely to plague us with their costly and frustrating PLDD nonsense, just go on and on, existing. And so do people who deserve The Higgy and have not yet received it. Thus, The Higgy marches on, never lacking for worthy contenders.

Yes, with the arrival of April Fool’s Day, it’s time once again for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award – “The Higgy.” Each year, we (dis)honor the most (un)worthy candidate from your nominations of people afflicted with PLDD (not BSDD, note the difference).

Past “winners” of The Higgy include Abraham Flexner, Alison Collins, Mark DiRocco, Kosoko Jackson, John Wiley Bryant, Plato, Chris Christie, Jonathan Gruber, Paul G. Kirk and the incomparably petty inaugural winner, Pascal Monnet.

The award is named for history’s greatest monster, William Higinbotham; as a special way of (dis)honoring Higinbotham, we have not even given him The Higgy.

Get your nominations in by April 15, Tax Day – definitely a day to discountenance petty little dictators!

To inspire you to greatness in discerning pettiness, we carry on immemorial Higgy tradition and reproduce below the text of Jay’s original post launching The Higgy. Good hunting!

********************

As someone who was recognized in 2006 as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, I know a lot about the importance of awards highlighting people of significant accomplishment. Here on JPGB we have the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, but I’ve noticed that “The Al” only recognizes people of positive accomplishment.  As Time Magazine has understood in naming Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ayatullah Khomeini as Persons of the Year, accomplishments can be negative as well as positive.

(Then again, Time has also recognized some amazing individuals as Person of the Year, including Endangered Earth, The Computer, Twenty-Five and Under, and The Peacemakers, so I’m not sure we should be paying so much attention to what a soon-to-be-defunct magazine does.  But that’s a topic for another day when we want to talk about how schools are more likely to be named after manatees than George Washington.)

Where were we?  Oh yes.  It is important to recognize negative as well as positive accomplishment.  So I introduce “The Higgy,” an award named after William Higinbotham, as the mirror award to our well-established “Al.”

Just as Al Copeland was not without serious flaws as a person, William Higinbotham was not without his virtues.  Higinbotham did, after all  develop the first video game.  But Higinbotham dismissed the importance of that accomplishment and instead chose to be an arrogant jerk by claiming that his true accomplishment was in helping found the Federation of American Scientists and working for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.  I highly doubt that the Federation or Higinbotham did a single thing that actually advanced nonproliferation, but they sure were smug about it…

I suspect that Al Copeland, by contrast, understood that he was a royal jerk.  And he also understood that developing a chain of spicy chicken restaurants really does improve the human condition.  Higinbotham’s failing was in mistaking self-righteous proclamations for actually making people’s lives better in a way that video games really do improve the human condition.

So, “The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best.  Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.

We will invite nominations for “The Higgy” in late March and will announce the winner, appropriately enough, on April 15. Thanks to Greg for his suggestions in developing “The Higgy.”