The oddity is that the left in most of the world has been so intensely critical of Sweden’s experiment. If this model works, it would hold out some hope that the coronavirus could be managed without putting millions of members of the left’s own blue-collar base out of work. Yet the prevailing attitude is less “let them try” and more “excommunicate the heretics.”
I prefer to use the three-axes model. For those of you new to this blog, the model says:
Conservatives like to frame issues in terms of civilization-barbarism, accusing their opponents of being on the side of barbarism.
Progressives like to frame issues in terms of oppressors-oppressed, accusing their opponents of being on the side of the oppressors.
Libertarians like to frame issues in terms of liberty-coercion, accusing their opponents of being on the side of (state) coercion.
For conservatives, the easiest way to frame this in civilization-barbarism terms is to cast China in the role of barbarians. President Trump has taken that approach.
Progressives instinctively reacted against this. Early in the crisis, the progressive framing, as articulated by WHO and some American progressives, was to charge that racism was behind the fears of the virus. They saw themselves as heroically fighting against anti-Chinese prejudice.
Since then, the progressive framing has become less clear to me. I have seen, but forgotten to bookmark, a few articles claiming that the virus crisis is harder on minorities because their death rates are higher and harder on women because they bear the burden of caring for children home from school. Those articles would represent oppressor-oppressed framing, but to be honest, I don’t see them as representative of what most progressives are saying at the moment.
For now, I see progressives as focused on claiming President Trump has badly mis-handled the crisis. It seems to me that they place a higher priority on that than on establishing an oppressor-oppressed narrative. Such a narrative may emerge later, perhaps in the report of the investigative commission that many progressives are calling for.
Libertarians are being driven bonkers. Myself included. I don’t have to repeat what I already have said. I see as villains all of those who seem to me to automatically praise activist government regardless of whether it helps while ignoring the possibility that the private sector can adapt effectively.
Of course, libertarians are backfooted by the undeniable fact that there are externalities here. If I behave recklessly, I can endanger others by infecting them or using scarce hospital resources.
Should it be legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet or for a restaurant to have a smoking section? Many people would say “no.” Libertarians would be inclined to say “yes.” There is some of the same division over whether or not you should be allowed to eat in a restaurant these days. And libertarians are not winning the argument.
Most progressives also subscribe to a narrative in which intelligent technocrats and experts can and should direct human affairs rather than the aimless will of the masses (or markets). I think the three axis model understates this technocratic side of the left. There is some tension between the technocratic narrative and the oppressor vs. oppressed narrative. Right now most on the left seem to be thinking in terms of the technocratic narrative. If only the experts were in charge instead of the (Republican) anti-science politicians, if only they had enough funding, we would be handling this so much better. The selection of Fauci as the hero of the story and Trump as the villain (the virus itself reduced to a supporting role) and almost zealous efforts to play up the tension between them as much as possible (the two could say the exact same thing one after the other and some major media outlets would characterize it as “Fauci smacks down Trump’s lie that…”) is a great example of this narrative in action. And given Trump’s obsessive consumption of popular news media it has ironically probably made Fauci’s job far more difficult and become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
+1
An anecdote: Several weeks ago my wife received a call and the person on the other end was in full TDS. Since my wife had the call on speaker, I could hear most of the conversation. “You have to stop watching Fox News.” (We don’t watch Fox. Perhaps you should stop watching MSNBC.) “Science is science.” ( Science is search for knowledge but a vast majority of research is proven to be unverifiable or false.) The person pointed out that in late January Trump denied that the virus would be a problem. (True. Though two wrongs don’t prove a right, I wonder why Congress didn’t act. Oh yeah, the impeachment trial. Also, when did WHO declare it a pandemic?)
Definitely, and you can see this not just on the left, but the technocratic crowd in general. Look at Tyler Cowen as a good example.
Yesterday’s libertarians are today’s statist martinets. The China model, that is lockdowns, was embraced without quibble.
One prominent libertarian posits if we do not have lockdowns then we will have to insulate the elderly in bubble wrap. And yet, that same libertarian concedes that lockdowns will fail and require additional lockdowns.
So we all stay in our hidey-holes and wreck the economy.
Yes, the public has a right to quarantines and a right to suggest the elderly self-sequester. But lockdowns for a novel cold virus that presents no threat to perhaps 95% of the population?
“Yesterday’s libertarians are today’s statist martinets. The China model, that is lockdowns, was embraced without quibble.”
Well said. I thought I was the only one in the universe to notice this.
If the virus only threatens 5% of the population, that is over 16 million citizens under threat. I am afraid that is a very scary number nationwide. On that kind of number, the libertarians will lose every time.
The actual number of persons who have been hospitalized, even in crowded New York city, is far less than 5%, so far.
Put it another way:
I am disgusted by having 30 million persons lose their jobs, if all we are doing is preventing or just delaying 50,000 deaths.
i am not disgusted, just saddened, if the job loss was to prevent up to 16 million deaths.
The problem is how does one prove a counter-factual? Most governors, other politicians, and technocrat will say the lock down worked if there are fewer deaths than models predicted. But was it the lock downs or were they just hyping the worst case scenario? Why is it necessary to go into full precautionary principle mode?
Danno, you are 100% correct. There will be every incentive in-place to justify the policy actions that society carried out and even more incentive to hide/conceal/mask the consequential damage done because of those policy actions. There’s just too much at stake for the truths to be learned because acknowledging them against the backdrop of the mess created would reveal some very ugly things about most of humanity and how ‘we’ think.
The terrifying models supposedly claimed to assume that ‘lockdown’ action would be taken. And some epidemiologists have pointed out that extended lockdowns will prevent meaningful herd immunity.
The actual death rate, especially considering what we know about the thousands infected with little or no symptoms, is FAR less than 5%.
The renowned modeler Neil (not be confused with Nial) Ferguson who greatly influenced the world reaction predicted 2.2 million US deaths. That’s not close to happening. He pedicted 200 million global deaths from ‘bird flu’ (actual: 455). He claimed 50-500K deaths from ‘mad cow’ (178). The CDC predicted 2 million deaths from ebola, the reality was about 2% of that number. Ferguson has since backed off on his crazy numbers, but the damage is done.
When will people realize that mathematical ‘models’ are very often wrong, way wrong. And yet having a few letters after your name and saying the right things gets you in the NYT.
In a few years, we will have books written about the biggest panic of the century, not just socially but by governments who are currently responding to problems by digging down even deeper.
It’s a serious disease, but as diseases go it’s FAR from apocalyptic. There is research into the credible theory that it hit California back in Nov or Dec, but was then just classified as flu. Buried in flu numbers, it was seen as just a nasty, early flu season.
“I am disgusted by having 30 million persons lose their jobs, if all we are doing is preventing or just delaying 50,000 deaths.
i am not disgusted, just saddened, if the job loss was to prevent up to 16 million deaths.”
But, at what threshold do you change your mind from being disgusted to not being disgusted? And, why did you choose that threshold?
I always think I’m a different sort of libertarian from most, because I think 1) it’s pointless to try and define our liberties without reference to the rest of society and 2) other forms of coercion are often just as bad as state coercion.
This leads to my conclusion that state action is preferable to societal collapse. And that is what will happen if even “only” 5% of the population suddenly gets sick and dies.
What Sternberg is missing is that the left’s base is no longer blue-collar workers but rather the upper middle class who can pretty easily work from home.
What’s interesting to me is that, almost regardless of political alignment, the response of the federal and state governments has been criticized. The left views this as Trump’s failure and the right views this as Technocrat’s failure. But what exactly has failed? Is it that that US death rate is higher than other countries? Is anything short of a minimal death rate a failure? Was it a failure to close international flights when they did, instead of earlier. By any type of failure metric, it seems that blame should extend to both sides of the aisle.
Perhaps one advantage of the libertarian perspective is to refuse to engage in such “blame-gaming” and acknowledge that the failure is politically secular.
Various governments in the West in which varying parties were in power failed to varying degrees on most of the same issues. Sometimes that shows up in the death rate and sometimes not, because there is a lot of chance as well.
For the most part I expect incumbents, regardless of political party or actions (none of which differed that much), to get blamed. I’d like to see the various bureaucracies that failed get blamed too, but I doubt that will happen.
What failed?
We didn’t do what most of the East Asian countries did. No good controls. Not enough tests. Didn’t have enough equipment. Didn’t send the right medical and cultural signals (masks, etc). Western numbers are all relatively bad, but Easy Asian numbers aren’t. I grant you that there are a lot of reasons why we didn’t replicate that success, but that is the failure comparison.
I see this as a failure of the libertarian perspective though. Libertarians (tend to) to reflexively agree with anyone who says the government failed, and also that blame extends to both major parties and to the system as a whole.
But… your questions can implicitly be answered as “there weren’t any major failures of government”. The government has responded about as well as could reasonably be expected. Looking around the world, our particular government has probably been more successful than most.
Thus, I think the reasonable libertarian response is to (within reason) praise what can be praised about the government response. My big picture view is:
1. Our choices are between bad and worse.
2. This kind of situation is exactly why, from a libertarian perspective, we continue to need governments.
The libertarians I see reflexively criticizing the government, to me, aren’t very useful. What I prefer is a positive, constructive vision. That is, “as a libertarian, I want a small government, but effectively responding to crises like this is why I do want a government and am not an anarchist”.
In that context, there’s plenty of potential criticisms that are easily turned into positive roles. Basically, “the government should be doing X” not “the government wasn’t the super-intelligent, hyper-moral brain that should have seen this coming”.
“The government has responded about as well as could reasonably be expected. Looking around the world, our particular government has probably been more successful than most.”
Nope. Not even remotely close. You know what the 3DDRR is in Taiwan today? 1.2. Why? Because they had the sixth person (out of 24 million) die today because of the disease. The last guy died way back on March 30th – 11 days ago.
Ok, true, the US is 14 times bigger, so, to be fair, equal success would be about two deaths a day.
Instead, we’re at two thousand.
That’s 100,000% away from successful.
Actually it’s even worse. Because that 100,000% doesn’t take into the account that in addition to all those deaths, while we are locked down in economic ruin, political insanity, and fiscal obscenity (or is it political obscenity and fiscal insanity, I get confused), they are mostly going about their lives as normal and business as usual, just with masks on.
That’s “success”. Correcting for both zeros – negligible health impact and negligible lock-down, we’re a million or ten million percent away.
Almost all their new cases are Taiwanese citizens coming back home, who caught it in feckless Western countries. To them, we are the sh*thole country.
It’s not just a tragedy, it’s humiliating.
By the way, this is what Tyler Cowen means by “State Capacity Libertarianism”. If the choice is between your state having a competent CECC and all its scary power, vs not having it, and getting what we got instead, then the strategic libertarian makes that compromise, to avoid an even worse fate.
One can wish one had better choices, but apparently that’s all we get. In a crisis, you go to ideological war with the state capacity you have.
Is it too cute to say that you are both right and that the important word is “reasonably”? East Asian societies had the experience of SARS and a cultural acceptance of masks. So their governments acted quickly and productively. Western societies had neither. Their governments reacted poorly.
It may well be true that “The government has responded about as well as could reasonably be expected.”
Not too cute for me., since I’m the one who said reasonably and “better than most” not “absolute best”.
That’s entirely the point. Libertarians are supposed to understand that government responses aren’t capable of magic. That’s why we criticize the utopian progressive ideals as bad ones.
Even in relatively well-run governments in relatively free societies we expect that even the things the government should be doing will be unlikely to be done in optimal fashion.
So it’s reasonable and accurate to say that the US has performed quite a lot better than numerous somewhat similarly free democratic countries (eg Spain, Italy, France) and somewhat worse than the countries that seem to have offered the best response (Taiwan, South Korea, maybe Germany).
Further, i don’t think it’s a very libertarian response to blindly assert than any, every, or our country in particular could have adopted the approach of a particular other country did better.
To do that, it seems like you pretty much have to accept leftest assertions of governmental omnipotence that libertarians generally scoff at.
So if it’s difficult to get people not used to wearing masks to wear masks, that’s not your fault.
But if you tell them not to wear masks, that’s your fault. I’ve seen a lot more masks since that got reversed.
Bloomberg built a stockpile of medical equipment to prepare for just an event like this. De Blasio sold it off or threw it in the garbage to save money. Both had budget constraints, one managed it and one didn’t.
To what extent do you grade on a curve? What constitutes the unattainable and what constitutes the attainable but difficult for which you deserved to be judged?
To what extent does creating the circumstances in which something is unattainable confer guilt?
Or is there some minimum necessary standard which if you fail to reach it then it doesn’t much matter the above answers, you either got it done or you didn’t.
Perhaps we were never going to be East Asian good at this, but the reasons for that are as much based on decisions that have been made before and during the crisis as dumb luck.
I found out that by changing on line identities I can have any political alignment I want. This is especially true when my priors, low commercial property taxes, are violated. I will lie cheat and steal to prevent that. Using the three axis model helps me plan compatible conversations regardless of the forum, like faking it.
Can this three-axis model predict future events in a useful way? Or can one just read the news and fit what happens to the model? Arguably, even a ridiculous model can do the latter.
https://spectator.us/covid-antibody-test-german-town-shows-15-percent-infection-rate/
German data:
Antibody test in German town shows 15% infection rate…
—-
In the contradiction between death rates and spread rates, spread rates seem to be high.
It might be even more contagious than that – to the point where it already completely “ripped through” the whole local population, because only 1 out of every 6 exposed people develops the infection.
Notice the similarity in the percent of people infected, and compare to situations in which one might have expected everyone to have been exposed, and to relatively high viral doses.
Chinese study of 391 in Shenzhen of people who shared households with confirmed cases: 15% infected.
Diamond Princess cruise ship: 634/3711 passengers. 17% infected.
Gangelt randomized study: 15% infected.
I’m not confident at all in this pattern yet, but it’s interesting, and makes it ever more imperative that we do a lot more big random studies fast.
The oppressor-oppressed angle that I’ve seen showing up from progressive friends online has been focused on the disparate impact on rich vs poor, e.g. “rich people get to telecommute from home and big businesses get bailed out by the government while poor people are either forced to put their lives on the line as essential workers making minimum wage or get laid off as their rich landlords still insist on them paying rent.” I don’t typically see it used to explain the situation – aside from some of the more conspiracy-minded rants about how the GOP deliberately planned to let things get bad so it could wipe out the poor – but I do see plenty using that angle as a way to blame capitalism and call for the standard list of progressive demands.
Progressives view coronavirus as a proxy for climate change. We hear the same narrative: Americans aren’t altering their consumerist lifestyles enough, despite warnings from scientific experts. Progressives view coronavirus and climate change as punishment from a secular god for Americans’ sin of excessive consumerism. Scientists are prophets whose calls for abstinence and atonement must be heeded. (Note, that is 180 degrees opposite from the traditional view of science: a tool for technological innovation to *obviate* the need for sacrifice and abstinence.) The coronavirus shutdowns and the Green New Deal are like Progressive Lent, except it’s not supposed to end after 40 days.
Progressives root against the Swedish (and Japanese) experiments because, if successful, they will demonstrate that consumerism need not lead to catastrophe. When progressives criticize Trump for not acting sooner, they seem to suggest that Trump should have called for more and harsher social distancing (abstinence) sooner. Actually, however, acting sooner would have meant using targeted contact tracing to avoid abstinence, e.g., Taiwan’s highly successful approach, which did not involve closing businesses or even schools.
The connection to the oppressor-oppressed axis is that progressives view American consumerism as unchecked privilege. They are certain that it must cause great calamity, whether in the form of environmental damage or even disease.
As for blue collar workers, progressives don’t actually like them. They are Trump’s base after all, and they are every bit as consumerist as everyone else. Rather, progressives are anti-business. In management-labor disputes, and *only* in that context, blue collar workers become progressives’ enemy-of-my-enemy. That’s why progressives’ favorite unions are actually *white collar* unions: teachers unions and government services unions. Those people work in classrooms and offices, not factories.
This meme posted by (at least) two of my progressive friends perfectly demonstrates my point. (Sorry, if you can’t see the image without logging in to facebook.)
https://www.facebook.com/climatestrikefriday/photos/a.116803659805826/156207922532066
First, note the connection to climate change: “Climate Strike Friday”. Then, the claim that social distancing is not just about defeating the virus: “Nothing should go back to normal.” Finally, atonement: “We will have lost the lesson. May we rise up and do better.” The “lesson”? We must atone for our consumerist sins and “rise up and do better”.
[you need to make your point more politely–ed.]
Progressives are mostly using oppressor-axis to gain power, and “moral superiority” in the easiest fashion, not because they truly support the oppressed. They hire illegals as nannies – but do NOT pay $15/hr or more plus health benefits.
Today, it’s much easier to get moral superiority status by being anti-Trump. Hating some particular person seems far less tribalist than hating all Republicans, altho in 5 years we’ll all see most of the Trump-haters will become Pence- or X.Rep- haters. Because it’s Democrat Derangement Syndrome, not Trump DS; nor was it Bush DS as named in 2003, nor was it unnamed Reagan Derangement Syndrome in 1980.
Libbers on virus, or any mass health.
It’s the Drunk Driving issue. How much freedom is an individual allowed, by the social community, when society believes they are abusing their freedom by endangering others? We have 0.05% blood alcohol levels, or some other level.
In Slovakia, also doing as well or perhaps better than Germany, we had masks and a lockdown since early-mid March. The Gov’t started wearing masks on TV.
Trump should do that – and insist on all meetings that all folk wear masks.
Because, with masks, the contagion rate is so low that the health system doesn’t get overwhelmed.
Trump’s being doing good – the gov’t bureaucrats have not been. One reason the USA response HAS been, if a bit slow to start, so recently rapid is Trump’s push to deregulate. It seems that when some FDA/ CDC absurdity gets publicized, the WH gets that silly reg waived.
All Libbers should be focusing on failure of gov’t overregulation.
Plus, more honesty about the costs of being prepared.
There’s a report out in 2018 by hospitals talking about how well prepared they “are” – but in fact, it’s a Fake Report. Fake preparedness.
The best Libertarian/ Minarchist position is to want smaller, more competent gov’t.
There’s no chance of much smaller without budget constraints, and Trump is NOT a budget cutter. Tho again, Dems are worse than Reps on spending. Let’s remember the Rep House of P. Ryan did give Trump tax cuts, but not much else, and virtually no culture war help nor any help in Collusion Hoax. Couldn’t even get Hillary to testify under oath about her illegal emails.
It’s easy to blame Trump, but elite Reps / RINOs, have long been a problem. Hopefully, tho probably not, Trump will lead a big Republican takeover of the House so he can get more of the smaller gov’t the USA needs for growth.
Growth that could grow our way out of our debt trouble if we could also reduce gov’t spending growth to less than econ growth.