Whenever government repeals a bad policy, my first reaction is amazement.
Then gratitude.
Swiftly followed by indignation, because no matter how bad the repealed policy was, the government almost never apologizes.
Homely example: The FAA used to ban the use of any electronic device during takeoff and landing. When the rule finally went away, I was amazed, because I expected to endure this petty tyranny for all the flights of my life. Next, I felt grateful for this small expansion of my freedom. Soon, however, I became indignant, because the government never apologized. A half-hearted, “Sorry that our paranoia inconvenienced people billions of times” would have gone a long way.
The same holds for the COVID crusade. Almost all vaccines sharply reduce contagion. Yet for months, government kept forcing vaccinated individuals to wear masks and socially distance. When the CDC finally changed its guidelines, I was amazed. Then grateful. Yet before long – and to this day – indignant. A half-hearted, “Sorry that our paranoia trampled the freedom of hundreds of millions” would have gone a long way.
A clever public choice economist might respond, “Getting government to repeal bad policies is nigh-impossible already. If leaders have to apologize when they repeal, repeals will virtually vanish.” Plausible, but you could also say, “If governments know they’ll have to apologize when they repeal bad policies, maybe they’ll be more cautious about adopting bad policies in the first place.” It’s the same as the logic of war crimes trials:
One common objection to the Nuremberg trials was that they gave bad incentives to future war criminals. If war criminals know they’ll be tried and executed if they lose, self-interest urges them to fight to the bitter end. From this perspective, the trials were short-sighted. They satisfied the impulse for revenge, but extended the duration of future wars.
On reflection, however, that’s only a medium-run view. The apostle of credibility could easily retort, “Yes, the Nuremberg trials encourage future war criminals to fight to the bitter end. But they also discourage future leaders from committing war crimes in the first place. We should take a truly long-run view.”
But how abject of an apology does the public deserve anyway? It depends. If government justified a bad policy with hyperbole, willfully overstating the probability and severity of bad outcomes, then we deserve a giant blubbering apology. At minimum.
In contrast, if the government justified a bad policy with agnosticism, admitting that the probability of severely bad outcomes was low, then even I’ll settle for a low-key apology. Though as I’ve argued before, government minus hyperbolic rhetoric is practically impotent:
Why are proponents of government action so prone to hyperbole? Because it’s rhetorically effective, of course. You need wild claims and flowery words to whip up public enthusiasm for government action. Sober weighing of probability, cost, and benefit damns with faint praise – and fails to overcome public apathy.
Added bonus: When government explicitly admits that, “The probability of a severely bad outcome is low, but caution makes sense until we know more,” the natural response is to try to swiftly ascertain the truth. Mostly notable, if the world’s governments had responded to COVID with an earnest admission of ignorance, the impetus to apply the time-tested experimental method would have been far stronger. Voluntary Paid Human Experimentation wouldn’t merely have given us vaccines sooner; it would have allowed us to calmly cease a vast array of ineffective COVID precautions a year ago.
I’d like to assert that, “History will not be kind to the enemies of Human Challenge Trials,” but that’s wishful thinking. History is written by the victors, and the victors of COVID are unapologetic innumerates. Though we deserve a massive apology, we’ll be lucky to walk away with the freedoms we took for granted back in 2019.
READER COMMENTS
Parrhesia
Jun 15 2021 at 12:05pm
I don’t think that government feels it did anything wrong. I would think that those in charge of the CDC felt like they made the right choice at the right time despite knowing that vaccines were effectively reducing the spread. They probably wanted to maintain a social stigma around going maskless.
KevinDC
Jun 15 2021 at 1:59pm
Indeed, they almost never do.
It’s entirely possible that was their goal, but I think it was foolhardy for them to attempt it in that way. More specifically, I think one of the biggest mistakes policymakers indulge in is believing themselves so capable of accurately predicting people’s behavior such that they can “fine tune” social interactions like this from on high. Jeffrey Friedman gives a book length critique of this mindset in his book Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy. Among many points, he argues that technocrats can’t actually know in advance how people will interpret and react to the technocrats attempts at steering their behavior:
Maybe the CDC was hoping to perpetuate social stigma against people not wearing masks, regardless of whether or not those people were vaccinated. But in doing that, they also undercut their own messaging on the vaccine. They were saying to people that the vaccine was safe and highly effective, but also insisting that fully vaccinated people needed to act as if the vaccine was completely useless. And, as the old adage states…actions speak louder than words. Telling millions of people that even groups of fully vaccinated people together still needed to act like nothing had changed caused lots of people to say “Well then what good is this vaccine then? It sounds useless to me. So why bother?”
This isn’t entirely idle speculation on my part – I recall a survey a while back that was looking at willingness to get the vaccine. Across all age groups and political ideologies, the questions “Would you be willing to get the vaccine if doing so meant you no longer had to mask and socially distance” caused the “yes” response to jump up dramatically – if memory serves, the smallest gain depending on which group you were looking at was still something like 20 percentage points. Which means the months of “fully vaccinated people must act like nothing has changed” plausibly kept the number of people who got vaccinated artificially lower than it would have otherwise been, especially as vaccine supply exceeded demand – which, in turn, would drag things out longer and cause more deaths.
Someone might defend the CDC by pointing out, probably correctly, that they couldn’t have known that people would have reacted in the above way to their messaging. But that just brings me back to the point Friedman was making – the fact that they couldn’t have known how people would react to their spin, is itself something that they could and should have known. I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s okay to say something you know not to be true when doing so can avert terrible consequences with high certainty (insert obligatory hypothetical about Nazis asking if you know where any Jews are hiding). I’m much less sympathetic to the idea of saying something you know not to be true when you have no reliable way of knowing whether or not doing so will make things better or worse.
(Note to self – learn to write shorter comments.)
shahofblah
Jun 15 2021 at 1:25pm
CDC just makes guidelines, not rules. How does a guideline infringe upon liberty?
Christophe Biocca
Jun 15 2021 at 1:55pm
In the former, the actor apologizing is the politician, in the latter the actor apologizing is the government. Governments don’t have feelings, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about the incentives they face.
So unless you expect the person who originated the terrible policy to also be the one who repeals it, the cost of having to apologize for terrible decision-making falls upon someone who had no hand in it and whose only options are “repeal and apologize” vs. “keep”. Much like “having to pay it back later” doesn’t discourage deficit spending now because the expected time horizon is longer than the time in office.
Philo
Jun 15 2021 at 10:04pm
Bryan is thinking of the government as a (continuant) moral agent. That is inappropriate.
Perhaps some individual politicians should apologize, but only if their action caused the bad policy to be adopted—which pretty much means they voted for it, and it was adopted by a single vote.
Andrew M
Jun 16 2021 at 8:48pm
Big can of worms here. But two quick comments:
Would you say the same for politicians’ praiseworthiness as for their blameworthiness? They wouldn’t, because they claim credit–and expect thanks–for policies they advocated for and voted for when a single vote wasn’t decisive. (Is probability-raising enough causation for you?)
We certainly treat committees, families, and the like as (collective) agents. If the government can act and err, then if it did err, it should apologize. Wouldn’t that give Bryan all he needs?
Jens
Jun 17 2021 at 4:38am
Treating families as collective agents is rarely adequate in my experience. Most of the time, you don’t go wrong if you treat families as groups of people who have close emotional ties and dependencies (which can have negative and positive connotations). And it is correct that there are situations in which families are represented externally by individual actors. But the legal system lags behind social developments in that respect very often. Nothing is certain here. Am I responsible or praiseworthy for what my brother did or does ? Rarely. Can siblings act as natural teams and friends. Sure, sometimes. It’s a can of worms.
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