There’s been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking on what went wrong, so let me give some kudos to the Economist magazine. I usually read it right away, but I have fallen behind and recently read an old issue from early March. It’s dated March 7, but the article seems to have been penned around March 4:
The disease is in 85 countries and territories, up from 50 a week earlier. Over 95,000 cases and 3,200 deaths have been recorded. Yet our analysis, based on patterns of travel to and from China, suggests that many countries which have spotted tens of cases have hundreds more circulating undetected (see Graphic detail). Iran, South Korea and Italy are exporting the virus. America has registered 159 cases in 14 states but as of March 1st it had, indefensibly, tested just 472 people when South Korea was testing 10,000 a day. Now that America is looking, it is sure to find scores of infections—and possibly unearth a runaway epidemic.
My data source indicates that the US had 158 cases on March 4. On the same day South Korea had 5621 cases. Today, Korea has 9786 and the US has 174,750. What went wrong? And why didn’t we see this coming? Here’s the Economist, from the same issue:
And in America the response to date has been a shambolic missed opportunity. Shockingly, the worst American bungling has more in common with the catastrophic early stages of the Chinese epidemic—when officials minimised risks and punished truth-tellers, thus letting the disease spread much further and faster than it might have—than with the country’s later co-ordinated control efforts.
This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. At the time of these articles, the US had very few known cases, and I don’t think many people expected us to have 18 times as many as Korea by the end of March. The Economist’s prediction was absolutely right; we blew it.
I’d prefer to not make this post about the US only, and certainly not about the current President. There is plenty of blame to go around. Rather I see this as a broader failure of the West. Europe has been hit even harder than the US. Both political parties were too complacent. Heck, I was too complacent. Even though I was more aware of the risk than most of my neighbors, I did not predict this surge in cases, nor did I sell my stocks.
Back on March 16, a commenter named LC left what I regard as the best comment I’ve read all year:
I certainly didn’t expect things to get so bad in the developed Western democracies. I totally botched the forecast I made to my Chinese friends 2 months ago that our responses would be much better. (To their credit, none of them mocked me and have instead expressed their concerns for my family’s safety.) Looking back, I believe we (the people of democratic developed world), made the following mistakes that blinded us to this:
1. We assumed a free and open society always equals a competent government. While we all agree being free and open carries many benefits and China, if it had been open and free, could have handled things much better early on, we now know a free and open society by itself doesn’t guarantee a competent government. In that respect, governments in East Asia (including Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and Japan) have done a much better job than the Western developed governments.
2. We had too much hubris and pride. We always believed our experts, our scientists and our health systems are the best in the world. Thus, when US demanded Chinese let our CDC experts in, we were affronted when the Chinese initially said no. The press coverage was almost incredulous. How could they not let the “best experts in the world” go and see the situation and give them some guidance? As situation developed and as Donald McNeil from NY Times has since reported, it turns out the Chinese experts are really good and are probably better than our experts. It’s a somber lesson.
3. We under estimated how pragmatic the Chinese can be. During the crisis, the Chinese repurposed some of their idle workers to be temperature checkers, delivery personnel and data gatherers. We should adapt a similar program to put some of the idled workers into more useful jobs (such as building masks and ventilators as you pointed out).
Going forward, I hope we have a thoughtful reflection of our short comings and not make these same mistakes again.
Finally, while the economic damage maybe great in the short term, I believe the important thing that counts is the number of lives we save. If we can keep the global death toll to less than 50K lives lost, it will have been worth it in my opinion.
He’s actually being polite; we now know that the CDC and FDA completely botched the testing program in America. In the West, there’s a tendency to think the whole world revolves around us. We are the standard by which all other societies are judged. If another country has a different attitude toward sex, or religion, or capital punishment, or any other issue, we judge it based on our standards of right and wrong.
Often I agree with our standards. The single worst mistake in this entire crisis was the Wuhan government’s attempt to silence doctors and cover up the epidemic. At least we don’t censor our doctors (although sometimes I wonder.) But LC gets at something important. It really is possible that some other societies are better at doing certain things than we are.
In East Asia today, there is growing prejudice against Westerners, who are seen as arrogant people that engage in highly irresponsible behavior that spreads the virus. I’m not defending that prejudice, any more than I’d defend prejudice against non-whites who behave differently from our customs. But sometimes it’s instructive to visualize things from a foreign perspective, to better understand why not everyone in the world thinks the West is the standard to judge everything by.
People don’t really know who they are until they see themselves through the eyes of another person.
PS. Yesterday I read a short story by Joseph Conrad entitled “An Outpost of Progress”. Conrad understood.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Mar 31 2020 at 7:00pm
Excessively vague question: do you think the variation in response effectiveness is primarily because east Asian countries were more prepared for an epidemic in the first place, or were they initially caught just as off guard but adapted to the crisis more dynamically?
Scott Sumner
Mar 31 2020 at 8:05pm
Maybe some of both. They’d gone through SARS and that alerted them to the seriousness of this problem. They also started with cultural practices (wearing masks, bowing, etc.) that helped. China is a special case because it’s so authoritarian, but the other East Asian countries did even better than China.
Jens
Apr 1 2020 at 4:26am
I agree with the general tenor of this article – SARS2 has been massively underestimated in the western world and that has a lot to do with arrogance and convenience. Just two cents. Not only SARS has sensitized people in East Asia. Also with MERS and the bird flu H7N9 there have been outbreaks with considerable lethality in recent years. Another point is cultural aspects. It is absolutely possible that customs and habits have a significant impact on reproduction number of the virus in certain countries/regions/cultural contexts. E.g. the simple fact that winter holidays and carnival in Germany coincide in February has proven to be a problem. It is very easy to say in retrospect: it should all have been canceled (stable! two-digit case numbers). But you should think carefully about whether you can blame someone for that. Blame for lack of adaptability and speed: yes, blame for traditional and habitual differences: very difficult.
Scott Sumner
Apr 1 2020 at 1:25pm
Someone once said “To understand all is to forgive all”. Yes, in that sense blame is not the right word. But we need to look in the mirror and re-think whether we in the West are as smart as we assumed.
Mark Z
Apr 1 2020 at 5:52pm
Well, Chinese lunar New Year is typically in January or February I believe and seems to make for sizable crowds, but this year it seems few people showed up to them. It seems Germans were just lest responsive tot he virus than Chinese. You’re surely right that SARS, MERS, etc. have educated east Asian societies about the threat of communicable diseases in lessons long forgotten by the west.
It’s been very easy to dismiss infectious diseases in America. We had been hearing about drug resistant pathogens that would kill countless millions for many years now that never really panned out, for example. I think westerners gradually settled on a very strong prior in recent decades that infectious diseases in general just weren’t a serious threat. I would be curious to know what fraction of spending/employees at the CDC are devoted to chronic vs. infectious diseases, and compare that with the equivalent agencies in other countries. I don’t think the number itself is important, but rather, as a reflection of how societies weight the relative threat of infectious diseases. I wonder if South Korea and Taiwan’s CDCs are still overwhelmingly concerned with infectious diseases, while ours has slipped increasingly into other areas.
Jens
Apr 2 2020 at 3:59am
Absolutely. And that is reflected in private, public and institutional arrangements.
Scott Sumner
Apr 2 2020 at 2:00pm
Very good points.
JP
Mar 31 2020 at 7:16pm
The graph assumes the data is comparable across countries and that the death rate from China is accurate. Both of these assumptions strain credulity. It is completely fair to question how well the West is handling the crisis and to question the statistics out of China.
Scott Sumner
Mar 31 2020 at 8:07pm
The other East Asian countries show the same pattern, so even if the China data is wrong, the general point holds.
Most people accept that all countries undercount, but I haven’t seen anyone deny that new infections have fallen sharply in China. In any case, that’s why I focused on S. Korea in this post.
Mark Bahner
Apr 1 2020 at 9:08pm
One very bad aspect of this graph is that it presents the data in terms of deaths, rather than “deaths per million population”.
It’s ridiculous to have a graph that shows Japan, with a 127 million, looking just slightly below Canada, with a population of 38 million.
In fact, Japan, at only 57 deaths to date (according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracking website) is simply astounding. They have almost everything going against them in terms of deaths per million people, including:
A) They have a population with a median age of 48, much older than most countries,
B) They are relatively heavy smokers, smoking over 1500 cigarettes per year per capita (where the U.S. is at about 1000…both numbers from wonderful Wikipedia), and
C) Their population density is very high.
So Japan should be studied carefully for their remarkable achievement of low numbers of cases and fatalities per unit of population. A good place to start would be here:
What’s wrong with this picture?
And what’s wrong with this picture?
What’s right with this picture?
So Japan should
Henri Hein
Mar 31 2020 at 7:52pm
This is true, but it’s also true for a lot of other countries. The French think the world revolves around France (not The West, but France specifically). Argentinians think Latin America, or maybe the entire Spanish-speaking world, revolves around them. The Chinese think at least East Asia revolves around them. The Russians may realize the world is not revolving around them, but they have been working for centuries to make it.
Scott Sumner
Mar 31 2020 at 8:08pm
Yes, but the military/industrial/cultural dominance of the West makes our hubris more noticeable.
Phil H
Mar 31 2020 at 8:25pm
Things that caused shock in my (Chinese) household: (1) Violence from the USA. Looting in stores and violence against Chinese citizens and Chinese Americans. Our international Chinese WeChat groups last month were full of advice to buy a gun. (2) The suggestion, apparently made in all seriousness by certain politicians, that it would literally be OK to sacrifice the lives of older people.
Things that are causing shock to me: the apparent persistence, even on this blog, of a form of the broken window fallacy, in the form of saying that it might be better for the economy to accept that more old people will die. The fact that it’s morally gross should be the warning. The fact that it’s economically incoherent should stop anyone here saying it.
Mark Z
Apr 1 2020 at 8:41am
What are the sources on this widespread violence? I ask because I live in a very big, very dense, badly affected city and… it’s pretty calm here. I’ve seen no evidence of looting in any stores. I’ve seen news stories about attacks Asians, but no statistics on how prevalent this is. In fact the most troublesome thing is how ordinarily everyone is behaving: lots of people jogging and walking their dogs in the park, staring at tourist attractions. I haven’t seen or heard much evidence of an uptick in violence.
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 2:20pm
I’m pleased to hear it. It wasn’t a reputable source, just paranoid online rumors.
JFA
Apr 1 2020 at 1:17pm
It is perfectly acceptable to have a utilitarian calculus govern decisions made by the state. You just don’t think that the current economic cost outweigh the potential benefit of saving lives. We do it all the time. You do it all the time when you spend money on coffee or a dinner out rather than giving money to malaria-fighting charities.
Let’s say that your aging parent could be given 1 extra month of life. How much are you willing to pay for that. $100,000? $1,000,000? How much are you willing to go into debt and finance that decision? Will you rob a bank to pay for the treatment? There is a point at which you will not find it worth making the effort to provide your parent with the extra month of life.
Likewise, there is a point at which impoverishing the nation is not worth saving the extra life years.
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 2:18pm
Nope, I think you’re just wrong.
Hard though it may be to believe, there are still people in this world (even atheists!) who don’t think that the value of human life can be measured in dollars and cents. These things are simply incommensurate.
Human life is infinitely precious, and if we all behave that way, it turns out that it is, in fact, possible to extend and save lots more lives than were ever dreamed of in the past. As a policy position, the right policy is to minimize deaths.
JFA
Apr 1 2020 at 2:29pm
I was about to try to convince you that your position is utter non-sense (which it is), but I’ll just leave it at this: I thought your aside about atheists was hilarious. I do think a little honest introspection will make you see that even in life and death decisions, there are tradeoffs.
This is something I think describes people’s views on money and death:
“George Bernard Shaw was at a party once and he told this woman that everyone would agree to do anything for money, if the price was high enough. `Surely not, she said.’ `Oh yes,’ he said. `Well, I wouldn’t,’ she said. `Oh yes you would,’ he said. `For instance,’ he said, `would you sleep with me for… for a million pounds?’ `Well,’ she said, `maybe for a million I would, yes.’ `Would you do it for ten shillings?’ said Bernard Shaw. `Certainly not!’ said the woman `What do you take me for? A prostitute?’ `We’ve established that already,’ said Bernard Shaw. `We’re just trying to fix your price now!’ “
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 8:42pm
Tradeoffs exist everywhere. The question is what the best policy should be. Consider things like a soldier’s policy of “I’d do anything for my brothers” or the standard military policy that soldiers must obey all orders. Consider the medical oath of “first, do no harm”. Consider the principle of equality before the law. All of these are absolute policies, and all of them are the backbones of their various areas of life.
I don’t think jokes by famous philosophers are nearly as trenchant an argument as you seem to think.
Mark Bahner
Apr 1 2020 at 9:35pm
In fact, members of the military are required not to “obey all orders”. They are instead bound by their sworn oath to “…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution…”
Here is the oath of enlistment (or re-enlistment):
Note that their oath to support and defend the Constitutional is unconditional, but their oath to follow orders is “…according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
So their oath to “follow orders” is emphatically not an “absolute policy.” The absolute policy is instead to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
JFA
Apr 2 2020 at 6:38am
I think the joke is more incisive if you actually a teeny tiny amount of introspection. Also, the oath of “do no harm” is a minefield when you consider that surgeons have to cut into people to save them or that oncologists have to poison their patients to provide any possibility of effective treatment. The medical philosophy literature is littered with arguments over side-effects potentially outweighing the benefits, so your appeals to universal maxims is not an argument against cost-benefit analysis. It’s actually an argument for them.
MikeDC
Apr 1 2020 at 2:34pm
The problem is that shutting down the economy isn’t just a matter of dollars. The longer the shutdown goes on, the more people will needlessly die of all sorts of other things.
– People put off getting their brakes fixed and get killed in a fatal car crash.
– People getting depressed and killing themselves
– Financial stress leading to physical stress
– People putting off routine medical appoints that would have detected and cancers and other diseases while they were still treatable.
And so forth.
Point is, you can’t escape that sort of trade-off. The decision that saves x people at one margin margin from corona virus will kill y people from other factors at a different margin.
Robert EV
Apr 1 2020 at 6:19pm
To add to your point:
Biomedicine companies which aren’t working on COVID-19 are “non-essential”. Which means delayed cures for other diseases.
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 9:08pm
Hi, Mike.
Yeah, that’s right, and that’s why I confirm below to Mark Z that this is an epidemic-period policy recommendation. But my policy recommendation, if it were carried out, would minimize all those other harms you list. Because if the USA had imposed a hardcore lockdown earlier (or even better, a really effective test and track program), most of the current outbreak could have been prevented. The disruption would be over much sooner, and then the damage to the economy would be much smaller.
My policy of minimizing loss of life to covid would actually also maximise the benefit to the economy. It’s precisely the compromising that extends the covid crisis, and ultimately ends up doing even more damage to the economy.
Mark Z
Apr 1 2020 at 5:35pm
“Human life is infinitely precious, and if we all behave that way, it turns out that it is, in fact, possible to extend and save lots more lives than were ever dreamed of in the past. As a policy position, the right policy is to minimize deaths.”
We could (and according to your philosophy, should) spend 90% of our income on healthcare so as to keep people alive for maybe a few more months. No one would ever eat anything other than cheap soylent, never take vacations, go to sporting events, we could not other producing any unnecessary consumer goods, or medicines used to treat any non-lethal diseases, we could all live in abject poverty to finance slightly longer lives. If you don’t want to live in that world, then you implicitly accept that there is a tradeoff to be made, whether you acknowledge it or not. Everyone already makes this tradeoff with their own and other lives every day. Every time you drive not only impose a risk of death on yourself, but others. Pretty much everyone implicitly concludes that the risk is small enough (i.e., the expected cost low enough) that it’s worth it to not just stay at home forever. And if we had, say, in 1900 adopted this policy stance, we would have diverted all of our economy toward trying to keep people alive at the time, but at the expense of the technological and economic development that would ultimately increase lifespan by far more for future generations.
Usually people who take your position through in some vague qualifier like, “within reason,” which is just another way of conceding the point. Granting that you really believe we should be willing to reduce output to 0 for a year and pay $20 trillion to save one life, you realize this means we should be doing this even if there were no COVID-19, right? Should we shut everything down to stop the flu as well? If not, why not? Can you answer without making implicit cost-benefit judgment or abandoning a radical deontological position about life-saving?
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 8:52pm
“We could (and according to your philosophy, should) spend 90% of our income on healthcare so as to keep people alive for maybe a few more months. No one would ever eat anything other than cheap soylent, never take vacations, go to sporting events, we could not other producing any unnecessary consumer goods, or medicines used to treat any non-lethal diseases, we could all live in abject poverty to finance slightly longer lives. ”
None of that is true, though. Living in abject poverty means people won’t live longer lives. Living in poverty actually makes us less able to finance healthcare. So these aren’t counterexamples to what I said.
“you realize this means we should be doing this even if there were no COVID-19”
In general, no, you can’t take a policy recommendation I make for one situation (epidemic) and claim that I therefore have to extend it to other situations (non-epidemic times). Policy can vary!
That said, I do think that for the most part, we treat human life as though it were extremely/infinitely valuable. When disaster strikes, we mobilise ridiculous resources to rescue people. Doctors swear to do everything in their power to cure people. Families regularly bankrupt themselves with medical costs. There are counterexamples, but the principle of human life being sacred is hardly alien, right? It’s a bit bizarre to encounter people like JFA who think that it’s “funny” to suggest that human life is vastly precious. That’s the kind of thing Hollywood villains say.
JFA
Apr 2 2020 at 6:50am
If your policy is to minimize deaths, it doesn’t seem like that should be dependent on whether there is a pandemic or not. If it is, you are implicitly buying into the cost-benefit framework. You are saying that the policies now are not worth it in normal times. And no, we do not act like human life is infinitely precious. You take risks with your life all the time, however tiny those risks are. Unless you are a Peter Singer convert and give any excess income to effective charities that save the lives of poor third world children, then you also don’t act as if human life is infinitely precious.
p.s. I never said it was funny to suggest that human life is infinitely precious (when consider from a government policy perspective, it was “utter non-sense”). I said your aside about atheists was hilarious.
Mark Bahner
Apr 1 2020 at 9:17pm
In fact, a case could easily be made that life-years are not “saved” by measures that are needlessly extreme.
Fred_in_PA
Apr 1 2020 at 3:38pm
Phil H;
You say; “Things that . . . shock to me: . . . saying that it might be better for the economy to accept that more old people will die.”
I suspect that it mis-frames the question to view it as “more old people … die.” Rather our aim should be minimize the total number of deaths across the society and the event (likely suitably amended to reflect number-of-years-left and quality of those years).
It is fairly well known that depriving people of their social contacts and their work leads to depression and to impoverishment / lack of a paycheck. That these, in turn, lead to self-destructive behavior (a.k.a., deaths of despair) and to deaths from deprivation (e.g., avoided the doctor to avoid the bills, or couldn’t afford both my medications and adequate heat, etc.)
Harvey Brenner’s work at Johns Hopkins in the 1970’s implies about 59,000 additional deaths in the U.S. from each one point increase in the unemployment rate. Depending on how alarmist you are, we could be looking at an additional 15-point (Steve Mnuchen) to 35-point (St. Louis Fed president James Bullard) increase in unemployment here. That implies an additional 900,000 to 2,000,000 deaths in the U.S. due to the economic collapse. (For reference, the worst of the Great Depression was 1933 when unemployment was 21.4 points above our recent levels.)
Both deaths among the elderly and deaths among the working-age population are a concern, here. And we will likely have to trade off more of some to get less of the other.
Phil H
Apr 1 2020 at 8:59pm
“it mis-frames the question to view it as “more old people … die.””
I’m responding specifically to claims by Dan Patrick of Texas. (And then amplified by Glenn Beck – I know he’s a nutjob, but the politician said it first.)
“about 59,000 additional deaths in the U.S. from each one point increase in the unemployment rate”
I expect that that was over the course of a year? Longer term? My argument is that the virus can be effectively stopped in 1 quarter through a fairly stringent lockdown. Once the virus is gone, the economy is free to restart. A one-time shock doesn’t harm the economy that much. Tens of thousands of people dying from covid will in fact harm it much more in the long term.
Market Fiscalist
Apr 1 2020 at 12:30am
My reading of ‘the best comment I’ve read all year’ is that LLC believes that governments that lack freedom and openness (including China under the leadership of the CCP) did a better job of controlling Covid-19 than democratic , free and open governments. I think it is too early to conclude based on currently known facts that this is true. However if it turns out that by (generally accepted measures) Covid-19 ends up having less effect in some Asian countries that lack freedom and openness than Western democratic ones then I still feel strongly that we may be premature in concluding (and I hope I am misinterpreting the message of this post) that the democratic and freedom-based principles (not necessarily of the ‘West’) are somehow no longer the relevant standards to judge things by.
Scott Sumner
Apr 1 2020 at 1:26pm
That’s not how I read his comment. Most East Asian countries are democratic, and the democratic countries obviously did better than China.
Tyler Wells
Apr 1 2020 at 11:19am
Isn’t it a little early to declare that the Asian countries handled this better? For sure Trump, Johnson, and other have hurt their credibility by first declaring that the best route was to stay calm and protect the most at-risk and then going to the other extreme of shutting everything down. Not having a consistent and strong message certainly hurt them politcally, but which extreme was the correct one is unknowable at this point.
I am no epidemiologist, but we will spend years arguing over this and will never have a satisfactory answer. Since every country will have some modification of behavior, it will be difficult to know what would have happened had no government taken action to prevent travel or normal everyday activities. Until we get somewhat reliable data on the R0 rates and mortality, which won’t be possible until an antibody test is available and a large enough sample is tested, we don’t really know enough to judge the responses of the various governments.
Scott Sumner
Apr 1 2020 at 1:27pm
This post is not about Trump and Johnson, who played only a minor role in this tragedy. It’s about the West.
Oleg
Apr 1 2020 at 2:25pm
“2. We had too much hubris and pride. We always believed our experts, our scientists and our health systems are the best in the world. Thus, when US demanded Chinese let our CDC experts in, we were affronted when the Chinese initially said no. The press coverage was almost incredulous. How could they not let the “best experts in the world” go and see the situation and give them some guidance? As situation developed and as Donald McNeil from NY Times has since reported, it turns out the Chinese experts are really good and are probably better than our experts.”
Who are the ones showing hubris here? Those affronted by not being permitted to examine a serious problem by what they regard as “lesser” experts, or those denying access to other intelligent people, even if “lesser”, for the purpose of perhaps providing a fresh and useful take on a serious problem, because they themselves are the superior “experts”?
Given the seriousness of the matter, surely the wise thing to do would have been to let everyone with a semblance of a brain have as much access as possible.
Scott Sumner
Apr 2 2020 at 2:04pm
Oleg, You asked:
“Who are the ones showing hubris here?”
Both
MikeDC
Apr 1 2020 at 2:55pm
First, exclude China, because we don’t have a good sense of what really happened there. There’s reason to believe that their “undercounting” is significantly different than that of the democratic countries.
Then, understanding that these are endogenous factors to some extent, there’s still a big difference between “the government/experts/health care system acted differently” and “people in general responded differently”. It’s clear to me that the baseline manners of folks in the FE (bowing vs. shaking hands, wearing masks when sick, etc) is superior with respect to slowing the spread of disease.
Of course, encouraging this can be seen as a long-run preparation and mitigation strategy by the government and health care system. We’d be wise to adopt these strategies in the West.
I’m less clear about the other specifics of government, expert, and health care institutions. Aside from obvious stuff that we already know like “don’t lie about things like the efficacy of masks” and “don’t over bureaucratize the process for rolling out medical tests, treatments, and vaccines”, what can we learn from these other countries?
Scott Sumner
Apr 2 2020 at 2:08pm
Taiwan was testing passengers from Wuhan as early as December. Read up on what those countries have been doing; they’ve been far more creative in addressing the crisis. We don’t even have enough masks for our medical people, even though there are plenty of masks available in the global marketplace. The testing fiasco. Mardi Gras. There are so many mistakes we’ve made.
anon/portly
Apr 1 2020 at 4:51pm
In one sense, this post doesn’t really say anything. “In the West, there’s a tendency to think the whole world revolves around us. We are the standard by which all other societies are judged.” Well, isn’t that sort of getting at a human universal? Are people less judgemental outside of the West?
“It really is possible that some other societies are better at doing certain things than we are.”
(Or from LC): “We had too much hubris and pride. We always believed our experts, our scientists and our health systems are the best in the world.”
I’m not sure that this is a nuanced and thoughtful frame.
First of all, take Western views of the East Asian countries. This is an economics blog. Surely almost everyone reading it has some dim awareness of the enormity of the East Asian achievement, in terms of catching up to the West very quickly.
Yes, maybe many ordinary people in the US and Europe are not aware of how smart and capable the people (and institutions) of East Asia are, but is/was this an important factor vis-v-vis the West’s response to the coronavirus?
(By the way, should we not believe that “our” scientists are the best in the world? How many of the world’s top 1000 scientists *from East Asia* currently work in American universities?).
To me, a more nuanced (i.e. good) approach would be to ask, what did the East Asians do right, and why, and similarly what did the Western countries do wrong, and why.
Note that East/West isn’t the only comparison of interest. What about US vs. Europe? If Europe’s really doing as badly as us, I’m actually a little surprised – maybe I’ve inculcated left-wing econ-blog views of European superiority, at least unconsciously. I actually think that if it’s true that the US response hasn’t been worse than Europe’s, that makes our response more understandable.
Also I don’t think it’s necessarily true that Japan belongs in the “East” – from all accounts their response has been much more similar to the “West” than the other countries in the “East.” (Maybe these accounts are wrong).
Anyway, rather than an occasion for bitterness and recrimination, I vote for understanding.
First of all, why should anyone, in retrospect, expect that Singapore and Hong Kong would react poorly? They’re city states – public health must be something of a priority, they went through SARS before, they have a precarious place in the world. When the Singaporean PM addressed his people, saying “we’re ready, we went through SARS, we have a plan,” I was impressed.[*] Who couldn’t have been?
I wonder if you couldn’t say similar things (SARS or MERS, situation vis-a-vis China) about Taiwan and Korea. I wonder if instead of the lesson “they got it right” the better lesson isn’t “they wouldn’t be who they are if they didn’t (at least have a tendency to) get this sort of thing right.”
Meanwhile the lesson in the US and Europe (and maybe Japan) isn’t so much “we got it wrong,” but “we wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t (at least have a tendency to) get this sort of thing wrong.”
In the US, we can see, or at least think we see, some places where our pandemic bureaucracy possibly dropped the ball – masks, testing regulations, stockpiling, etc.
I think Scott Sumner thinks the main fault lies in our reaction this year, in 2020, but I think differently – I think the big “East Asian” advantage was in the plan and strategy and people they had in place before January 1, not the reaction this year. If it was all about the reaction post January 1, wouldn’t at least one of the European countries have gotten that right?
“This is not Monday morning quarterbacking.”
If Econlog six months had held a roundtable discussion on the topic “what countries are best prepared for the next pandemic,” what would the participants have figured out, or guessed? Would they have been on the mark? If we can figure all this out now, why couldn’t we have figured it all out then?
So, sorry. This post reminds me a lot more of turning on a sports-talk radio station after my team lost on Sunday, as opposed to say checking out the DVOA numbers on Footballoutsiders.
[*] (So impressed I still believe him that the case fatality death will be roughly 0.2% – maybe I’m remembering incorrectly, but I think that’s what he suggested).
Scott Sumner
Apr 2 2020 at 2:16pm
Anon, You said:
“I think the big “East Asian” advantage was in the plan and strategy and people they had in place before January 1, not the reaction this year.”
That’s also my view. I also agree that social customs play a role, although consider that the Japanese are old, heavy smokers, and take crowded subways—so it cuts both way.
As for Monday morning quarterbacking, read my post again. Look at when the Economist made its criticisms of the US, and then consider the relative caseload vis a vis South Korea at that time, and also where most people expected the two countries to be at the end of March. Sorry, but you can’t accuse the Economist of Monday morning quarterbacking; they got it right–and I was wrong.
I disagree on the 0.2%. That cruise ship had 11 deaths out of 712, whereas your figure predicts 1.4 death. I think it’s at least 0.5% and more likely 1%.
Carpenter King
Apr 2 2020 at 8:41am
First of all, we had a rightful reason to be discontented when China didn’t allow the CDC experts, because they refused to cooperate internationally and provide us with information to help contain our crisis, after initially covering up the virus. Saying that it’s because we think we’re the best is, at best, a speculation.
Second, hubris is not unique to the West. It is very commonplace everywhere. Easiest place to look? China.
The Chinese propaganda machine has been claiming that the Chinese system, led by the Party, is way more effective at containing the virus than western democracies, and many Chinese people buy that and think their system is superior. They even claim that the Westerners don’t even know how to “copy homework” (you can confirm it with your wife, who, as you said in another post, follows Wechat conversations). Some of them even celebrate and mock the U.S. when the U.S. surpassed China in cases. This is hubris.
However, this is nothing new! Even before the pandemic, most Chinese people consider “democracy” a dirty word, because of the propaganda spread by the government. For example, they mocked democracies for not being able to achieve the same growth that they did. This is especially apparent in midst of the Hong Kong protests. If you start to criticize the Chinese government, they start to attack the west and say how much they’re better if you’re a foreigner, and they say that you are a traitor if you’re Chinese. You’ll encounter the same attitude if you criticize the Xinjiang concentration camps: the Chinese are very proud of the camps because they curbed terrorism. A spokesperson from the Chinese government, in response to an American journalist, even said “I hope you don’t forget the pain of 9/11”!
Even before the HK protests, you can observe the same sentiment. Whenever you criticize their government, they will demonstrate national pride, and the most common response is “Have you ever been to China?” or “We are an economic miracle!”. Or sometimes they’ll get a self-induced orgasm from their widely use of mobile payments, mocking the west for falling behind.
Hence, Scott, you are very humble, and there is a lot of hubris around the world.
Lorenzo from Oz
Apr 3 2020 at 12:44am
For completely unrelated reasons, I have become deeply disenchanted with Western Departments of Health. They have promulgated or acquiesced in nutrition guidelines which were not evidence-based and are now implicated in an explosion in metabolic illness which may well, if the trends of the last few decades continue, overwhelm Western health budgets in a few decades.
Their budgets go up as the populations under their care get sicker, not healthier.
The pandemic response has just added another dimension to that disenchantment. Incentives matter. They matter more than experience because incentives drive how experience is processed and dealt with.
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