When a war breaks out, one of the things you have to do is fire many of the peacetime generals and replace them with officers from lower down in the ranks. The problem can be explained using the Game One, Game Two framework.
Game 1 is figuring out a winning strategy and executing it.
Game 2 is figuring out what you need to do to get a promotion.
In peacetime, the generals who rise to the top are the ones who play Game 2. In wartime, you need to find the Game 1 players.
The peacetime bureaucrats seem to be causing a lot of difficulty for the folks who are trying to play Game 1 against the virus. You need to find a way to route around them. There should be a Game 1 player to head up each of the following:
1. Hospital Logistics. Their job is to get hospitals the equipment they need, whatever it takes to do it. Presumably someone with a military background, although there is some expertise at places like Amazon.
2. Treatment Protocols. They should issue a “default protocol” for doctors to use if they want to use it. But they should encourage doctors who want to try different protocols to try them and document the results. You want to revise the “default protocol” as new information comes in.
3. Testing Strategy. Their job is to see that testing yields useful overall information in addition to information that is useful for individual treatment decisions.
4. Vaccine R&D. Eliminate roadblocks, direct funding.
5. International liason. Ensure that we learn from other countries and help them as much as we reasonably can.
6. Public Communications. Make sure that communication is clear and credible.
7. Financial Maintenance. Make sure that the priority is forbearance that works its way through to individuals and businesses. Not following the standard rule book.
Etc.
What motivates? 2’ers have learned to love rules. 1’ers love results. I think its important to understand that both want to win against the virus. 2’ers believe the collected wisdom of rules will save us. 1’ers know that chaos is our true friend.
8. Remove/reduce liability for medical providers
I’ve been thinking a lot about this one, living it, in a way.
I’d say first, you go to war with the bureaucrats you have.
Second, people want government officials to take legal risks, but they don’t want to take their own risks. Often times you can just break the rules and get away with it, because no one is going to bother prosecuting. So often there’s no real need to ask for permission or waiver, and even if denied, no real need to obey.
Third, the real game in the bureaucracy is Game 3: Don’t do anything that you’re not confident won’t get you in trouble.
There are actually plenty of Game-1’ers around, but in ‘peacetime’ they are hamstrung. To play Game-1, they they need to be empowered with resources, authority, and – more problematically – immunity.
You need to make sure they can’t get in trouble for erring on the side of winning the war. That means no lawsuits, against them personally, or, more likely, their agencies.
Which is a hard legal problem, much harder than most people might think.
Top leadership needs to be able to draft and promulgate an emergency issuance which lays out where on the spectrum of 0 to 100% to which the “ordinary rules” are being relaxed, in a concise way that can nevertheless be interpreted with clarity at any specific, granular level or activity.
This is impossible, as a matter of linguistics or legal theory or information theory or human psychology or however you want to look at it. You can’t just throw everything out the window, but you need to throw some things out the window, and it’s too hard to define which, in ways that convince bureaucrats acting at any level that they won’t get in trouble.
I’ve got some ideas on how to handle this issue, but it’s complicated and would take some lengthy explanation.
One of those ideas would be of the “out-terrorize the terrorists” model. Change nothing, except to say, that after the crisis is over, people will be able to sue on a cause of action of “unreasonably strict and unnecessary obstructionism in a crisis”, where the burden of proof will be on a bureaucrat / the agency to prove that the action was reasonable given that a crisis was going on.
So, for example, Dr. Helen Chu was getting federal money to study the ordinary flu, and had lost of equipment, people, and capability to turn to the problem of testing for Covid-19 early on. She asked if she could do so, and the feds said no, the money was specifically earmarked for flu, not Covid-19. She did it anyway, good for her, and thank God.
Were the fed bureaucrats right? Legally, technically, yes. Were they being unreasonably strict? Yes. Is this fair? No! But who cares. We ask soldiers to die, and so we can ask bureaucrats to take legal risks.
The point is, if “You’re damned if you do, but not if you don’t” you won’t. But if “You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t”, then you might! We don’t have to avoid legal pincers / double-envelopment. It sucks, but they can serve a purpose.
Do you know what is odd? I haven’t seen any of the usually level-headed bloggers talk about a cost-benefit analysis.
Suppose we give up about $9 trillion of GDP in the next several years to fight Covid-19 and save about 90,000 lives ( mostly old people by the way).
That’s about $100 million per life saved.
I hope I am overestimating lost GDP. Perhaps we will save 200,000 lives.
But at the risk of sounding callous… these numbers don’t really pan out. And since the United States is not China and we are not willing to live in a police state-lockdown forever, are we really going to save any lives except for a few months?
With everybody freaking out, this is going to sound strange, but it seems to me that we got really lucky this time. It could be a lot, lot worse. On the scale of 1 to 10 of scary plagues, this is maybe a 2 or 3. Imagine it was like gonorrhea and infection did not confer immunity because of variation of surface proteins. So you could just keep getting it again and again, and developing a good vaccine might actually be impossible. Imagine it was like Ebola or Marburg, but better at spreading before turning your insides into mush. Imagine it had the opposite effects on age cohorts, so that mostly little kids got sick and died.
It seems clear that we didn’t have our act together much, and we weren’t ever going to get our act together in the Business As Usual scenario. And anything more than a 2 or 3 on the plague scale would have crushed us orders of magnitude worse than what we’re experiencing now.
We needed a “Goldilocks Crisis”, neither too mild nor too severe, and this is it.
We are going to lose a fortune, and we may not save many lives in the end. But the value of the experience and learning from it may one day end up paying dividends that make those trillions look like pennies.
+1
Do you really think we will learn anything? Isn’t more likely that we will now overreact even lesser viral threats, and do so every year or two? Really, we are going to expend enormous resources to save, maybe a million people, and argument will be used next time that you need to expend the same amount to save 500,000, or 100,000. What is going to be the counter-argument to this? That those 1,000,000 deserved it more than the 100,000?
We have lost our minds, there may not be a way back.
“Do you really think we will learn anything?”
Well, we can’t personify the entire collective. Some will learn, of those that learn, different people will learn different lessons, and some of those people will be able to help make changes that constitute real progress in terms of our society’s ability to deal with similar situations in the future, that hopefully aren’t completely cancelled out by all the other people working inconsistently at cross-purposes on counterproductive efforts.
For example, one thing American politicians have learned is to stop worrying and love the ad hoc improvised bailouts and helicopter drops of money on everybody funded by enormous piles of new debt. This is sad and bad, however, there’s no sense trying to deny it anymore, or to not expect it, or to put any hope in structural legislative fixes that might avoid it. It should go into CBO, Fed, etc. estimates as the baseline scenario for crisis response, and to the extent Congress tries to forbid that, everyone on staff should resign en masse with a general boycott from the professions, because doing otherwise is to be complicit in intellectual malpractice by participating in willful deception of the public.
Sorry, angry, so ranting.
But you might be surprised to the extent the government can genuinely improve after an embarrassing failure. FEMA really is better after Katrina. Insider threat mitigation really is tighter after Snowden. Locked cockpit doors are an improvement that would not have happened without 9/11.
In particular, the government is good at spending lots of money buying and stockpiling things which are already developed. We are going to spend tens or even hundreds of billions, but next time there will be plenty of masks and ventilators and pcr machines. That will help a lot.
Sounds like we need more:
czars.
I thought the idea of these top level political appointed honchos was to give orders that override the “usual op procs” in order to get things done. Including maybe having sub-czars for each of the 7 or more areas in need of fast tracking to get things done.
I think people need to think more deeply about the implications of our implicit model of the exercise of power in a ‘crisis’.
The general intuition seems to be that the Business As Usual rules, procedures, legal risks, etc. have lots of annoying costs and delays and veto points, but that overall those costs produce a larger benefit, for example, better cooperation when there is consensus.
In Crisis, when time is of the essence, for many normal procedures, the costs suddenly go way up, so the benefits no longer justify the rule. So, you need a corps of wise, experienced, capable leaders with good judgment and expert advice to be able to “put out all the fires” and identify these issues on the fly with authority to temporarily suspend them so long as they do more harm than good.
I’ve been watching how it all plays out in practice, and I’ve got to say, the model, as intuitively appealing as it may be, is wrong because mistaken about the BAU cost-benefit assumption. Almost all the regs being suspended are very bad in ‘wartime’, but still bad in peacetime.
In practice, there turns out to be a big difference between exercising crisis police powers or martial law and imposing temporary restraints of liberty (e.g., to travel, to congregate), and doing “temporary deregulation”. Typical liberties meet the test of being presumptively salutary. Typical regulations don’t.
It would be better to permanently repeal and abolish those regulations – for wartime and then also peacetime, and if they are to come back, they have to be reestablished from scratch. I think it would be better for Czars to have that time kind of permanent deregulation authority, and *not* have the ability to merely suspend anything temporarily.
The reason wartime bureaucracies work is because of the tight feedback loops. We have a problem but we don’t yet know what is signal and what is noise. Fighter pilot John Boyd’s Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop might be a better analogy.
During battle things can go wrong that cause disorientation. On the fly we have to modify our OODA Loop, making horrible trade-off decisions that use our uncertain observations to both stay alive and reorient, often rebuilding our orientation mental model from scratch.
We are reorienting. As I compare health official performance, what I’m seeing is the standouts that are doing a handful of things right, compared to those that are doing nearly everything wrong. The officials that need to be fired are the ones that can’t pivot based on the new OODA Loop we are navigating. I can’t name anyone I think is currently capable of making firing/hiring decisions that will improve the situation.
Alex Tabarrok’s post today was the first GMU Econosphere opinion I’ve seen that seems to be a reorientation based on real-world signals.
I’m a little amazed at articles such as the WSJ one yesterday that talked about how the FDA seems to be pushing back pretty hard on its regulations and on Trump arguing for reducing restrictions.
I’m not a huge Trump fan, but I also don’t have the TDS that many do, and I wonder what the effect of Trump simply firing the director of the FDA would be.
Lots of folks in the media, of course, would flip, but at some point we have to recognize that “listening to the experts” does not, in this case, seem to be a good strategy.
Army looking pretty good right now: https://twitter.com/USArmy/status/1241185656094801923
I’d like to believe the US Army does a pretty good job of aligning (2) with (1). There’s no equivalent of West Point that FDA bureaucrats get trained at, is there? Maybe that leads to a lack of institutional memory regarding how to actually get shit done when a crisis of a particular type only crops up every few decades.
Hadn’t read this one until I saw it in the recap, but it matches well with Ben Horowitz’s Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO.
https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/