I and a friend have been exchanging messages about the idiocy that was the European Super League (or whatever the name was. I’m not even going to bother looking it up). He asked me if I would post anything here about the economics behind the league, either defending the idea or refuting it.

Here’s one paragraph from a previous post of mine that I would want to base that essay (if I ever write it) on:

When David Perell says that we have made the world cheaper, what I think he is saying is that we have figured out ways to cheapen the effort that we are willing to put into the act of consuming something. That something could be a meal, but it could also be extended to reading, viewing, or listening as well – and more besides.

https://econforeverybody.com/2021/03/08/maximizing_soul/

To me, the ESL is based on the assumption that a large number of us fans are willing to cheapen the effort that we are willing to put into the act of consuming football matches – that we are not looking to maximize soul. Thankfully, so far, that assumption seems to have been ever-so-slightly off the mark.¹

Anyways, he wrote a post about it, and we’ve been sharing stuff about it on and off. I sent him one written by Jonathan Wilson, and he sent me this response: “I seem to have covered largely the same points with way less finesse.”

To which my response was, that is my middle name.

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Now, I didn’t need to write any of that, and any half-decent editor would have lopped off that whole bit – and quite rightly too. But hey, this is my blog, I had fun writing it, and it was a welcome break from you-know-what.

But “I seem to have covered largely the same points with way less finesse” is all too applicable in my case when reading K. Sujatha Rao’s excellent article in the Indian Express today on India’s vaccination drive. It is worse in my case of course, because I haven’t even covered largely the same points, forget the finesse.

I won’t excerpt from it, because it deserves to be read in its entirety.

But I will reiterate (in my won words) points that I thought were especially crucial, and also list out some questions that I had after I finished reading it.

1. The point about the utilization of the vaccines that will be procured by the Government of India (GoI) is really a request for clearer communication. You simply cannot overstate the importance of clear communication.
   
2. If SII has received grants from GAVI and from the Central government, would a publicly available dashboard about capacity, supply chain bottlenecks, vaccine allocation by states/countries and specific timelines for capacity expansion be possible? I’m not trying to be snarky, I am genuinely asking. What are the reasons against such a dashboard being made publicly available?
   
3. I’ll ask again: Imagine a good with large positive externalities. Let’s call this good a vaccine. Let’s say that the supply of these vaccines is going to be tight. Let’s say that demand is very inelastic. Would you recommend fragmenting total market demand into smaller constituent curves? If yes, why?
   K. Sujatha Rao makes the legal argument in her article, and then makes the economic argument. Read both (and again, not being snarky), please tell me why we are choosing to do what we are doing – in this year of all years, and for this good of all goods.
   
4. She speaks of halving the estimated cost of INR 60,000 crores by invoking compulsory licensing and expanding production through the 18 manufacturing facilities in India. These must be back of the envelope calculations, obviously. But if anybody reading this has information on how one might create such an estimate (and an estimate of how much production will go up by via this route), please let me know.
   

Please, do read the article.

1. Sarcasm alert: the evil idiots who dreamt up that monstrosity have gotten exactly what they deserved. Not enough of it, if you ask me.[↩]