Last Friday, the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) changed its guidelines concerning the ways the Covid-19 virus spreads; on Monday, one business day later, the government agency changed again and reverted to its previous guidelines (see “CDC Removes Guidelines Saying Coronavirus Can Spread from Tiny Air Particles,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2020). Who will believe these politically-tainted public health bureaucrats?
Mistrust is justified not only by the catastrophic performance of governments in the Covid-19 crisis, mirroring the general failure of central planners in economic history, and the constant turnarounds of public health agencies, but also by the fact that for several decades, public health experts and activists have been falling in line behind any measure that would increase state power as their philosophy drifted towards a concept of public health as total government care. A paper of mine developing this point should soon be published by the Reason Foundation.
(The featured image of this post is the only one representative of central planning—although not meant to be so—that I could find in the politically-correct stock images service I subscribe to!)
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Sep 25 2020 at 12:02am
The problem is that good responses have also been government responses, including some of the most authoritarian governments.
If someone wasn’t already committed to your ideology, is there anything here to persuade them? Because otherwise, this just looks like preaching, not argument.
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2020 at 9:28am
It is amazing to me that people look at the worldwide bungling of COVID by governments of all stripes and say “yeah, these people need to be given more power.”
Jose Pablo
Sep 25 2020 at 10:51am
Despising the “central planners” as much as the next guy, I do think that the Covid19 pandemic present very serious challenges both to “judge” the effectiveness of the governments/agencies and to “extract” useful lessons.
I think that governments and agencies are (very likely) irrelevant and that properly judging their performance is an impossible task.
https://unemperadordesnudo.blogspot.com/2020/09/governments-are-mostly-irrelevant.html
“Luck” plays a significant role in any “covid19 related variable” you track, like in the case of the city of Bolton in UK mentioned in this WSJ article and sure accounts for the disparity of the death rates in different areas of the same country (there is an “orders of magnitude” dispersion in the results for the same “central planned set of actions”)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-shunning-new-lockdowns-fights-resurgent-coronavirus-with-local-restrictions-11600940232?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2020 at 11:15am
It is true that luck plays an important role and challenges on judging the actions of governments and private actors always presents challenges, not least of which is that we never really know the counterfactual. However, one can point to serious errors and missteps taken by governments that never should have occurred. I have a short article here on some of the missteps during the pandemic and I have a longer academic article forthcoming with Roger Koppl and a few other co-authors on expert failure during the pandemic.
Jose Pablo
Sep 25 2020 at 11:51am
Jon, sure you are right, and mistakes can be pointed out in the actions of governments, particularly “ex-post” (it will be extremely surprising if otherwise given the “incentive scheme” they have).
My point is that it is extremely difficult to stablish the real consequences of their mistakes. My guess is that they are “almost irrelevant” (except, maybe, when managing tail risks).
With the same mistakes from Trump and Fauci you mention in the article, Vermont and Wyoming got 9 deaths per 100,000 while New Jersey and New York got 180.
In South Korea, Daegu got 8 deaths per 100,000 and Seoul got 0.5. Again, more than one order of magnitude with the same “government mistakes”.
Counterfactuals are a limitation as you say. But even with the facts that we do have I very much doubt that the government mistakes or successes have been very relevant for the final impact (in human lives or even in the economy) of the pandemic (or to be more precise: “I doubt we have a good method to stablish the practical relevance of the mistakes”)
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2020 at 12:49pm
That’s not quite the relevant comparisons. You’d want to compare Vermont to Vermont, Wyoming to Wyoming, etc. In other words, did the “noble lie” increase Vermont’s deaths to 9 from, say, 2? Not to mention the subsequent panics about lockdowns and whatnot.
I seriously doubt the missteps by governments are almost irrelevant. In the US alone, the missteps are costing trillions and trillions of dollars.
Jose Pablo
Sep 25 2020 at 1:24pm
“In other words, did the “noble lie” increase Vermont’s deaths to 9 from, say, 2”.
Not really, the real question would be: how did the “noble lie” change the probability of observing 9 deaths in Vermont?
And even this would not be the key question to manage the situation. The right question would be: how did the government actions reduce the probability of having deaths in excess of X in Vermont? We do not know the answer, only the right approach to managing this kind of risk.
The probabilities of getting more deaths in Vermont without the “noble lie” than with it are, very likely, significant. Given that the “number of deaths per 100,000” variable has a distribution which belongs to “extremistan” (quoting Taleb), Vermont without the “noble lie” could have had deaths an order of magnitude higher than Vermont with it did … or not.
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2020 at 5:25pm
Indeed so. Although, thanks to the aforementioned failures, we do not even have the data to begin to analyze.
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