COVID-19 KILLED THE RADIO STAR

My wife and I are back from our vacation in Italy, and good timing too considering that the Italian government - like many others, including Iran, Japan and South Korea - has started identifying cases of Covid-19 (the now-determined proper name for the epidemic we were just calling "the coronavirus" for about a month) within the country in people who have not been to China or have any significant interaction with Chinese people. That is to say: the infection spread at this point is probably great enough that the chances of significantly halting a flulike virus are pretty low, so we'll all just have to deal with it.

The good news at this point, such as it is, is that although Covid-19 is significantly more lethal than your average flu bug (in between ten and twenty times more lethal - which means about 1-2 deaths per hundred people who contract it) - in large part because it can debilitate healthy adults more powerfully than standard flus can do, which means that unlike most of these flus it isn't limited to doing most of its damage to children and the elderly - it's still, in the end, a flulike virus. It mostly kills people by weakening them so much that a pneumonia or other infection can take over and finish the job, which is bad but on the other hand, we've known how to fight pneumonia for a long time now. This is why all the breathless reporting about Covid-19's death tally is a little overblown: because alongside the death count there's another, much larger survival count.

This isn't to say that Covid-19 isn't serious, because it is. A lethality rate of about 1-2% is a lot of people this thing will potentially kill, and that's before you consider the knock-on effects like international tensions between countries arising out of the effects of the virus. But what's important is that so far, it is serious within our given frameworks for how we deal with these sorts of problems - as, indeed, most plagues have been for the past thirty years or so.

BERLIN, RENT, AND YOU

Berlin is freezing rents because it has the same problems basically every large city has with residential expense explosion. Let's talk about that for a bit!

Berlin was, for a long time, a big exception to "large important cities are expensive to live in." There were a lot of theories for this, verging from silly ones like Berlin being somehow special to more reasonable ones like it being a majority-rental residence city to a greater extent than many other metropolises. (Metropolii? Metropolities? Walruses?) But, because of demand (in part exacerbated by younger people moving to Berlin specifically because of the cheap rents), rents have skyrocketed and people are being priced out, and what's happening to Berlin is something familiar to people in lots of other places - younger and middle-class people have been priced out of central Berlin, pushing them to the outskirts and suburbs and edge cities (in Berlin's case, Potsdam - but Mississauga, Laval, Newark, Pasadena, Ilsan and La Defense, among others, are all the same sort of thing).

There is no easy way to deal with this. For a long time, the theory of rent control abolishment was popular because it was believed that the landlord/developer class, made free to pursue profit, would seek to satisfy market segments - so if there weren't enough rental units or new properties for, say, families of five, the market would see that more units would be made available, because why miss out on potential profits? The problem with this theory was twofold, however. (Well, more than twofold. I am simplifying here tremendously.)

The first problem was that existing communities, for the most part, never want more people living among or near them. Some people respond to this performatively by saying things like "no, I want more people living near me!" and so forth, but in practice this really isn't true because more people in close proximity means more noise, more dirt and garbage and more competition for space, be it public or private. (It also means more exposure to crime, but in most cases it usually means less absolute risk of crime - large cities mostly tend to be safer on a per-capita basis than small cities or rural areas.) To put it in strictly personal terms, I love living downtown - but man, I wish the local homeless junkies would hang out in a park less close to me. (They're mostly pretty harmless, but man are they noisy.) In policy terms, the result of people not wanting more people gets expressed in NIMBYist campaigns to prevent community development and/or zoning laws preventing upscaling of larger residential building complexes.

The second problem is that land is a finite resource: they are not making more land, and they are particularly not making more land close to areas that are prized by a great many people - IE, large cities. Because land is a finite and demanded resource, this in turn means that developers the world over have realized that the most profitable way to build units is to build them cheaply and in great number - which means either large family units on cheap land (IE, far away from cities - encouraging urban sprawl, which is bad on any number of levels) or large numbers of tiny units on expensive land (IE, tiny condo units in highrises). What cities need to grow is room for families to be able to live at reasonable cost, and as time has progressed we've come to realize the free market is simply not good at providing that; the incentives to do otherwise are simply too great to overcome.

Hence the search for other options. Rent control (and Berlin freezing rents for five years is certainly rent control) is a popular one because it's simple: if rents are too high, freeze them and let inflation take care of the problem by reducing rent over time as purchasing power increases. Of course, the problem with rent control traditionally is that it encourages landlords not to invest in their properties (since it removes the economic incentive for the landlord to increase the property's profitability). This is why the conservative-leaning Christian Democrats in Germany (who don't run the municipal government in Berlin, although they're currently in charge of the country) have criticized the law.

Is there a good answer? I don't know. Getting rid of (or at least minimizing zoning regulations helps by removing obstacles from developers seeking to build larger residential units, although any politician doing so would probably become unpopular quickly because of the aforementioned NIMBYism. That said, zoning regulations only remove obstacles rather than create incentives, so either you essentially bribe private developers to build the residential units the city needs (expensive) or build state housing (less expensive in the short term, but creates an ongoing political football because the maintenance budget for that housing inevitably becomes a target for cost-cutting pols).

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched since last update:

The Two Popes (2019, Fernando Mereilles, Netflix) - 4/5

Stuber (2019, Michael Dowse, airline) - 2.5/5

Harriet (2019, Kasi Lemmons, airline) - 1.5/5

The Addams Family (2019, Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, airline) - 2/5

Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw (2019, David Leitch, airline) - 2/5

Charlie's Angels (2019, Elizabeth Banks, airline) - 2.5/5

The Prestige (2006, Christopher Nolan, airline) - 4/5

The Current War (2019, Alfonso Gomez-Rajon, airline) - 2/5

As you may be aware, we spent the last week and a half in Italy (Florence and Rome, specifically) and I can say conclusively that A) Italy is pretty good! and B) every joke you've ever heard about crazy Italian drivers is absolutely, certainly, 100% true.

See you in seven.