Socialism should therefore be called “coercionism.”
. . .another good name for the system that the non-conservatives and the non-socialists among us favor would be “adultism.”
2. I am still cranky, for the same reasons as before. We still do not have results of random-sample testing to have an idea of how many people have the virus in various regions. We still do not know how viral load affects outcomes. We still do not know whether people get it from touching surfaces and then touching their faces, or whether they have to breathe near an infected person. We still are not conducting any scientific experiments. Instead, we are contemplating mass “experiments” with changing regimes for social distancing, arguing over putting at risk either more economic activity or more human lives. Worse yet, we really won’t learn anything from these “experiments.”
We still talk about political leaders “re-opening the economy,” as if the economy is theirs to re-open and individual choices will not be affected by the virus. People still expect that any and every household and business can be saved from the consequences of the virus, because government has the know-how and skill to undertake this. People still conceive of government as an infinite storehouse of riches that is disconnected from any need to obtain the wealth that it purports to distribute.
what has been increasingly whitewashed in the story of California and Washington’s success in battling the coronavirus1 is the role tech companies played: the first work-from-home orders started around March 1st, and within a week nearly all tech companies had closed their doors; local governments followed another week later.
So, the approximate order of events was: private sector response, then local government response in the west, then response in the east and by the Federal government. But as Thompson points out, the east coast media have missed this aspect of the story.
4. Ali Hortaçsu, Jiarui Liu, and Timothy Schwieg attempt to do some epidemoiology.
we find that 4% to 14% of cases were reported across the U.S. up to March 16
The paper describes their methods. As of March 16, according to this site there were 4300 reported cases. But if the authors are correct, there were between 3000 and 100,000 actual cases.
I suspect that the ratio of unreported cases to reported cases has gone down since then, but I have no idea by how much. We now have almost 600K reported cases, and if we have between 6 and 25 times as many unreported cases, then that would mean between 3.6 million and 15 million people have had the virus.
Economists are probably building better models than epidemiologists. But random-sample testing would be much better.
This doesn’t fit your recommendation, but it is part of the puzle:
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-begins-study-quantify-undetected-cases-coronavirus-infection
“We still talk about political leaders ‘re-opening the economy,’ as if the economy is theirs to re-open and individual choices will not be affected by the virus”
1) Again, this seems like a strawman argument. Who precisely is arguing this?
2) Yes, the economy will not return to 100% capacity on Day 1. But, it’s not about that…it’s about getting us from 40% to 70% as expeditiously as possible…and then building upon that one clumsy step at a time. That will yield huge gains. And, STEP #1 in the process actually does require government action…lifting the “shelter in place” type orders throughout the country. Until this happens, nothing else will follow.
“Economists are probably building better models than epidemiologists”
Can you provide any support for this…better in what sense? And, is this ex ante or mid-stream or ex post? I feel like a lot of this is a “pot calling the kettle black” type argument. Or, in other words, basically all of the models are rubbish due to the noise.
Tyler and many others have resorted to this argument as a red herring to paper over their massive over reliance on the forecasts of epidemiologists which said that there would be a massive shortfall of beds and ventilators unless the economy was shut down.
1. McCloskey’s vapid attack on democracy is unworthy of response. And notice she is happy to call China a tyranny on its internal affairs but is completely silent about its global machinations. If you want adultism, you can find it in Andrew Michta’s “The Long Hard Road to Decoupling from China.” https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/04/08/the-long-hard-road-to-decoupling-from-china/?utm-access=rcw
2. Even bigger problems need more immediate attention. More doctors have come out arguing that respirators are the wrong treatment and are doing harm. Nevertheless, according to at least one source, Medicare shells out $13,000 for a COVID admission to a hospital but $39,000 if a ventilator is used. Not a good incentive. How and when is the medical community going to resolve this question and how many lawyers are going to get rich in the process? Related, John Hinderaker links to a 2005 article in Virology documenting the efficacy of chloroquine based treatments for Coronaviruses. When are the Democrat politicians going to stop with their political stunts attempting to block access. Clearly this is an organized campaign with the genocidal intent to kill off older Americans who are disproportionately conservative.
Worse yet, we really won’t learn anything from these “experiments.”
===
Pandemic is diverging chaos, the data is only good ex post.
In terms of PSST, data is no good until you get a channel packing scheme up and running. It is sort of the definition of a pandemic, severe chaos.
So, the approximate order of events was: private sector response, then local government response in the west, then response in the east and by the Federal government.
The private sector that responded were large institutions that either:
1) Could easily shift their business model to work from home.
2) Had a business model completely at odds with the virus (NBA, airlines) and probably wouldn’t have had customers within two weeks anyway (at which point many people would have gotten sick and held them liable for such recklessness).
I didn’t see restaurants, bars, etc closing. Small businesses, where a lot of transmission would be happening, seemed to close after the government response. In many cases because the government forced them too.
I can say for a fact that my wife’s office didn’t close until the official order came in. She works for a small firm. Two people got COVID.
Also, before the shutdowns, I didn’t see anyone taking this seriously. No masks. No social distancing. No cancelled events. No changed habits. I couldn’t convince my Dad not to go to a singing event the night before Trumps big press conference. Only after that did his singing group start cancelling its meetings and he agreed not to go out.
It may well be true that people might be counted on to change their habits *today*, but I’m not convinced they would have without the lockdown. Or if they did, it would have been after another 2-3 weeks of exponential growth, when even a regular Joe going about his day would notice what is going on.
This is why I think the “reopen” will be more rapid, abrupt, and state-directed (as in, as a consequence of policy relaxation) than Kling. I think there are several asymmetries at work that makes “coming out” different from “going in”.
First, yes, there was a very wide spectrum of response, both on the part of individuals and organizations. Some got spooked early, and took spontaneous, voluntary measures to make themselves and other parties safer, while others weren’t going to make any changes at all no matter what matter what, without a credible threat of coercive state punishment. One sees this even now with regards to certain businesses pushing their own private interpretation of “essential” to the limit and remaining open. Also, many restaurants still allow walk-ins to pick up carryout, and I’d say the majority of workers in my anecdotal experiences aren’t doing anything more than normal, that is, what the state health code absolutely requires of them, and in particular that means no masks or temperature checks, even now.
One asymmetry is the question of legal liability. When the crisis began, businesses asked their lawyers whether or not they could get sued for remaining open if people claimed they caught the disease, and plenty of counsel responded with ‘probably so’. Even a lot of frivolous cases or a class action can still prove ruinous.
That’s why a lot of businesses would be leery of reopening without a federal preemption of liability for such things (based in, what else, interstate commerce), which many are actively lobbying for. I predict Congress will give it to them, because they don’t want to stand in the way of putting people back to work, paying taxes and the rent, and so forth.
But, like state prohibitions, that is a special watershed event that suddenly lifts a huge amount of uncertainly simultaneously for everyone, which tends to accelerate the process of lots of decentralized applications of judgment and personal preference. Once all businesses know right away that it’s legally safe to resume normal operations, many are going to immediately shift as far back to normalcy as they think is optimal for profits, which I think in most cases is 100% back to normal.
Will employees or customers balk? I doubt it. I think there is a lot of pent up desire for things to go back to normal, to behave in typical ways again, and that the first people to brave the new openness will be the kind of folks with the minimum desire to deviate at all from those pre-crisis ways. Their actions and behaviors will be conspicuous and will thus present as “normal” to everyone else, and normal social pressures and conformity instincts will mean most everyone except the especially vulnerable will just quickly go back to doing what they did before. I thus don’t think this will be a “sea change” event.
The asymmetry of typical economic pressure is something to note as well. Going in, many businesses were suffering. After months of the economic equivalent of barely surviving in starvation mode, in their desperation they are going to want to make up for lost time and money, and, while I don’t particularly like “race to the bottom” arguments, I think places that don’t jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible will put themselves at a potentially fatal competitive disadvantage, and knowing that, all the doors will open the moment the law lets them.
Another asymmetry is lots more information about the virus going out than going in. We will know a lot more about the level of risk for different activities and people, and know more about which mitigations give the most benefit for the cost, for those people and activities. We will have a smartphone contact tracing regime soon with the Google-Apple-Bluetooth approach, and probably also immunity certificate ‘passports’. And people know that every day, more people are immune, and we are closer to vaccines.
So, the “reopen the economy” talk probably really is a matter of the event of the government decision to lift general prohibitions on most businesses.
By the way, the model of how individual customers and decentralized business decision-makers will respond to government decisions is super important for deciding on when and how to make those government decisions.
If you think people will respond in diverse and sensible ways based on individualized, reasonable, well-informed views of their individual risk, and the riskiness of certain activities, then the government could drop a lot of prohibitions pretty soon, and even mostly at once.
If you think state measures are holding back a lot of pent-up, contagious-disease-spreading activity that will mostly resume the minute it’s not outlawed, like a dam-break flood, then it would be wise to take a low and slow, then wait and see, look before the next leap, gradual approach in tranches.
I think most people and businesses will suddenly resume normalcy once the restrictions are lifted, so I’d go for the latter course of action.
“Socialism should therefore be called ‘coercionism.’”
Good golly…the believers in the libertarian movement seem so out of touch with themselves and logical thought.
They pulled all of the Coronavirus alarms, but they somehow, someway expected that a free market response to the problem would magically appear (despite a VAST historical literature that points in the exact opposite direction).
You want a Coronavirus lockdown…then a socialist style government response will soon follow. It seems axiomatic because it is.
So, please stop all of the post hoc complaining. It just seems so naive.
Libertarianism rests on the idea that “what I’m doing doesn’t effect you so why is it your business.”
They often overestimated the extent to which this statement was true, but in an age in which the next breath you take could kill the person standing next to you, it’s a hard sell.
On the other hand, the state is standing in the way of a lot private activity and experimentation that could quickly reveal ways that could help a lot, fast.
The testing fiasco is a case, and so is the mask-production certification process of NIOSH. Some states placed environmental standards of certain sterilization facilities that shut many of them down, and were very slow in allowing temporary resumption of normal operations, even in the midst of an emergency with high levels of unmet demand.
Here’s a forward-looking example. Eventually there will be plentiful antibody / serological tests that are cheap, fast, and widely available. It’s possible we will have an “immunity certificate passport” regime, to allow people who are no danger to themselves or others to do any normal thing, so long as there are good gatekeepers who will check a reliable certificate system.
Which will create a big incentive for lots of low-risk people, especially young ones, to get themselves intentionally infected. Now, there are safe and socially-responsible ways to do that, and unsafe, irresponsible ways to do it. But it’s clear that the safer approaches would be completely illegal, and so those won’t happen.
Overall, the political ideologies that are prominent among American intellectuals have not performed well in this crisis.
There is plenty of, “this is why we can’t have nice things” to go around.
As Scott Aaronson and Alexander have pointed out, the intellectually heterodox-sphere has performed tremendously better than the mainstream at almost every point, and on almost any issue, related to this crisis.
When the virus is gone, that problem without a name that would mean “Everything Mainstream Is Dysfunctional” should still be haunting our nightmares. It’s not just “Your Entire System of Government Is Incurably Insane”, which sound mostly about government, and anyway, is a mouthful. It’s that normal intellectual life and normal institutions are becoming downright anti-functional, that to be normal and successful practically requires that one focus on things besides being functional.
Which is bad. Really, really, bad. Worse even than a pandemic.
That penultimate paragraph could use some (actually, a great deal of) expansion. Right now, it sounds crotchety but, historically, almost all your posts are well thought out and well expressed. Worth respectful consideration.
It would take a book. I’ll do my best to give the Amazon summary or blurb version of the outline.
Let’s start with the last part of wikipedia’s description of groupthink, “… results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.” Later, ” … there is loss of … independent thinking.”
Expand that tiny seed with Hanson and Simler’s “The Elephant in the Brain” regarding human motives to influence others via signals.
Now, think of the issue of “market failure”. That’s when there are special circumstances such that normal market forces don’t create the efficient outcome. The textbook examples are usually the Tragedy of the Commons (property rights issues more generally), Public Goods, and Natural Monopoly.
You could combine with the perspective of reliability engineering, such as “Failure mode and effects analysis”. Maybe the bridge is built to carry more than enough weight, but it turns out that if the crosswinds are just right, the oscillations resonate and the thing gallops higher and higher until it rips itself apart.
(As a related and amusing personal anecdote, I once had a friend with an old VW beetle with bouncy suspension. In almost every case it was adequate. But it happens that some long bridges and overpasses have expansion joints, and if you drove this bug the speed limit over a particular stretch of highway, it resonated, and it only took a few seconds to be literally jumping high in the air off the road, just before a turn. Only youthful reflexes explain my I’m typing here today, instead dead in a heap of scrap, which death, semi-relatedly, would probably be recorded as due to reckless driving and not to resonant failure modes. Would the automotive engineer had anticipated this issue back when the car was built?)
Put it all together, and you might appreciate the possibility of a “Social Failure Mode”.
So, for example, maybe you have something like peer review, which we can assume normally works ok if a particular field. But at some point the highest status positions all tend to go to a clique of like-minded friends, who use their reviews to amplify their own view and suppress other views, such that their view become orthodox and not contestable. Now the peer review system doesn’t screen out errors, it propagates them. That’s a Social Failure Mode of that system, the design didn’t have sufficiently effective countermeasures to root it out, and if it establishes itself, it self-perpetuates and is extremely hard to root out.
Ok, but what if a single Social Failure Mode (or a set of them, or a more abstract and general mode) emerges which is pervasive and ubiquitous? Anything that gets to the very root of the way humans interact with other humans, and the motives and signals which influence beliefs and clear thinking, would be especially dangerous and harmful.
This isn’t so crazy an idea if one goes back to the engineering metaphor. There are little hacks which can only due limited damage and which exploit particular implementations or settings of particular programs. And then there are huge hacks which get to the very root of systems and allow one to take total control or cause huge damage.
That’s the general idea, “the problem that has no name”, to borrow from Friedan.
The basic idea is that we are stuck in a General Social Failure Mode, the hack of which is to hijack the universal desire for status by giving people a way to signal affiliation with certain bad ideas by making decisions that are often at odds with the healthy functioning of their minds and incompatible with the purported purposes of their institutions.
Thanks.
There is a strain of libertarianism that says “the CDC is incompetent and it should have allowed private labs to make tests.” That strain may do well, but note that you don’t have to be a libertarian to believe that. Conservatives can believe it, even non-woke pragmatic leftists can believe it.
There is another strain of libertarianism that says something like “f*ck this lockdown, I’ll do whatever I want whenever I want a whose going to stop me” that is rather uniquely libertarian and comes across are selfish and childish rather then liberty enhancing.
I don’t think that sentiment will age well, and I’m not talking about vague talk of tradeoffs between economics and health. Non-insane libertarianism is still talking about closed schools and mask requirements (Lyman Stone had his first reply on twitter note that if you closing schools, banning large events, and forcing people to wear masks that’s hard to describe as “not a lockdown”).
Let’s say you think that track and trace can open up the economy more. What the hell is libertarian about track and trace? Nothing more libertarian than a total surveillance state tracking your every move and enforcing your quarantine.
I’m not against track and trace, but a population that assents to it is basically one that says “liberty has limits” in a way nobody would have admitted to before the crisis. The libertarianism I grew up with (live free or die, don’t treat on me) certainly isn’t going to do well in this environment.
Centrist policy wonk “libertarianism” which is barely indistinguishable from every other evidence based pragmatist centrist agenda might do fine, but it’s not really what I think of when I think libertarian.
All good points asdf.
Pretty much all other political labels have changed significantly in their conventional meanings over the last generation so I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised if that also happens with the label “libertarian.”
I don’t pretend to know which version of the many possible flavors of libertarianism will become the new conventional one. (There are a baffling number on offer by self-described libertarians.) I hope it is Tyler Cowens’ but I’m not that confident it will be.
Arnold,
You may have already seen this, but Scott Alexander and Andrew Gelman report on an RCT on different types of masks from 2015:
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/
* https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/15/rct-on-use-of-cloth-vs-surgical-masks/
It’s low-powered and in a different context for different pathogens, so could definitely benefit from a replication.
My apologies if you’ve already seen or written about this, I could not remember.