I’d be willing to forgive if there was some expression of repentance on the other side. I don’t think any of these people think their actions were incorrect. That’s the problem. Remorse and recognition of failure are necessary for forgiveness.
YES - forgiveness AFTER the ones who made mistakes admit their actions were wrong, and offer remorse.
Christian forgiveness is a big reason the USA, after the Civil War, continued developing so peacefully. The Democrat KKK folk who continued being racists were not remorseful, and didn't get better.
Elect Republicans and fire the bureaucrats who did this.
My non-negotiable item is that I want control over my kids public school funding. When the education establishment recognizes we need competition to prevent them from doing that again I'll forgive them. I'm not optimistic, I think we will pry that funding from their cold dead hands.
Our private schools were closed here as well. For a while by state order and then the county tried to extend it and the governor overruled them so they opened 6 months earlier.
Maryland had a lost year from Covidiocy. We were spared worse because we had a Republican governor. Gov. Hogan was "Lockdown Larry" the first three months however. I'll never forget his nagging for kids to stay home and not gather at playgrounds, because they had to "Stop the spread." Still waiting for his apology for that mind numbing idiocy.
I read it skeptically, looking for her reasons to "forgive" the decision makers who made bad decisions, but no such reasons were there. Certainly those not seriously harmed by other non-decision makers who disagreed should try to forgive and agree that there wasn't enough info to be so sure of their own positions.
She fails to discus those who were fired for not getting vaccinated; no data on how many lives were saved by the vaccine vs how many were lost - and how the public insistence that the vaccine death rate was 0 is shown to be false by the data. Even we who believe that millions of lives were saved by the vaccine should be able to accept that thousands of lives were adversely affected by the vaccines, with many deaths.
Most of those who criticize her also fail to note how sloppy and uninformative most public discussion of COVID remains, even after almost 3 years.
What is the death rate / what is the death rate per variant (about 100 variants & subvariants)?
How infectious is it?
What are the effective ways to reduce effectiveness?
In any pandemic, what parameters are needed to be known in order to recommend a lockdown?
To mandate a lockdown?
I'm so tired of hearing "news" and "opinion" with almost nobody addressing these key questions.
We know, now, that mistakes were made. Our civilization needs to know a lot more about what those mistakes were, and what the non-mistake (decision) would look like. All alternative decisions will have good and bad points, but the conversation avoids discussing this reality and almost assumes there was some possible "nobody gets hurt" perfect decisions available.
There weren't. We need an honest discussion of what was possible.
Our politicians also need to fire - fire/ punish - those bureaucrats who were not telling the truth. We get honesty by gov't workers, including honestly "not knowing for sure", when dishonesty results in getting fired. We won't get it without the dishonest folk getting fired.
Oster seems to want to get the honesty without firing the liars; and yes, wanting more mothers to vote Dem (like she did in 2020? disastrously) again. I'm pretty sure the Dems will lose big. Not at all sure the gov't liars will be fired - but she's wrong to want them forgiven instead.
What bewilders me was that in March 2020 it became unquestionable "fact" that any and all corporate, educational and government actions in response to Covid were justified, no matter how logically flawed. No matter how harmful.
How did this happen?
How do we prevent this type of panic from happening again?
We must not sweep the pandemic response into the closet of history until there is a public reckoning of how public officials got the pandemic response so wrong.
In terms of justice, Fauci’s performance during the pandemic is trivial compared to his hand in creating the virus in the first place. There must be a legal reckoning with the national security state and its authority to fund dangerous virus synthesis.
Yeah, dispositive evidence for or against the lab leak will probably never emerge unless the Chinese Government decides to provide it.
But there is pretty strong case that for senior western scientists conspiring to mislead the public under pressure from the heads of funding agencies. And evidence for that is not in the hands of China.
For me the Amnesty argument isn't about forgiveness, or whether I trust Fauci. I want the FDA, CDC, etc to be able to have honest internal discussions about what went wrong, and how to do better next time. That means they have to be able to start with "This was badly wrong, in important ways" and not expect to be fired or jailed for saying so, which means amnesty. Think "blameless root cause analysis". I'm not sure it will work, but I'm sure that holding out for vengeance will prevent the institutions that most need it from learning or reforming at all, and keep their efforts focused on denial and stubborn insistence that they did the right thing.
People in everywhere from tech companies to surgeries have "what went wrong" conversations regularly. Those conversations generally get much less honest and informative when people are concerned about personal consequences, especially career survival, because it becomes more important to avoid admitting wrongdoing (even honest error) than to accurately describe what happened.
I don't think that the failure is limited to bosses here, and I doubt a replacement of the leadership would accomplish much. There are a lot of procedures here that need to be scrapped or reformed, and even the best candidate for incoming boss would need the data from an RCA like that to know which ones to target and how.
As to the final point, my prior is strongly with FDA Delenda Est, and CDC Delenda Est while we're at it. But I recognize that those are politically nonstarters, and am trying to focus on a strategy with a plausible theory of victory.
> People in everywhere from tech companies to surgeries have "what went wrong" conversations regularly.
The blameless-analysis culture is a way of preserving this kind of norm where it already exists. Whereas it won't make anyone 'fess up anything if they already are bent on getting away with something.
If you have a hitherto successful cover-up that looks like cracking you need to be much more tactical. Identify a likely grass, and give them immunity in return for information. But for that you need a serious threat hanging over all the bad guys. We are very far from that point yet.
Who treated you as lepers, and who would you be asked to forgive? I tend to think that forgiveness is personal, and requires being asked for.
Amnesty, as an official moratorium on punishment, specifically for the purpose of improving institutional performance, is a different thing. I am broadly in favor of amnesty, in the "I don't care about punishing people, I care about doing better going forward" sense.
My school board behaved very poorly during COVID. A possible remedy was that the new governor asked for all the board seats to be up for election this November rather than staggered over many years, but this was stymied by the Democrats. Moving on to me means being able to elect a new school board that rejects what happened during the pandemic.
Similarly, my friends school boards decision not to mask was overridden by the state health board. I think all members of the state health board should be fired and disbarred from ever holding public position again.
I don't see how keeping these people around helps us to "move on" or perform better next time.
Kriss is clearly very high IQ, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn he has bipolar, schizophrenic, or autism spectrum relatives. Even many bright people will tend towards rhyming cyclicality of historicity drawn from nuggets in the information tsunami and this will be mixed with confirmation and hindsight bias and maybe the mirror of narcissus. I don't doubt the death of the current internet in some fashion. Does the internet of now look like 10 years ago, 20 years ago? It will be an evolution not a declining winking out of existence, even if that evolution is sped up to where we can see it before our eyes in real time if we are those blessed with the genetic lottery winnings of a longer memory. And this evolution will be informed by the past and the present and the future in a mix that someone is probably going to see coming, perhaps even someone we have never heard of. Also, Goia seems correct this is just the death of clickbait/internet, a reasserting of everyones story hungry mind, and the winners are those that can satisfy this, ie. youtube and substack.
Yes, I am not sure why Kriss claims that woke is done, but... has he looked at universities or corporations lately? Last I checked they are not cutting back on DEI spending, and in fact universities are upping their instances of job postings for which only minorities and women should apply. Maybe woke is less hip and cool than it was, but only because it has become too normal.
I am always less sure about corporations, but universities currently and peak woke are not necessarily inconsistent if it is a long and variable lag combined with advancing one funeral at a time. If the wokest faculty are 30 to 40 year old tenure holders they have a few decades to go. Again I have no ability to judge this and am not in this universe, I have just seen others that know academia talk about the vibe shift in the real world and say academia will be woke for another 50 years regardless due to these institutional/structural factors.
That's the thing, peak woke and woke being over are two very different things. Especially considering the universities are the indoctrination machines driving woke everywhere else, another 50 years of it being stuffed in every administrating requirement, job application and all the heads of departments means we have another 50 years of students being indoctrinated and going out into the world. That's a long tail end.
We can hope that corporation will start pushing back against woke and perhaps knock it out of new employees/college grads, but then we said that way back at the beginning of the woke wave, and instead of "the real world" sorting the problem we saw the woke create the clown world we live in.
Arnold, you ought to read the Oster piece yourself. It is short. More importantly, it isn't really what it says on the tin. What exactly it is is a bit interesting to think about.
Gonna have to disagree on that. I went and read it and found Oster can't even follow her own advice. She writes, "Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach?
To which I say, No, the public-health community didn't have to do that.
I interpret her to be is implicitly saying "please continue to vote Democrat and support the Teacher's Unions that threw your kids under the bus".
Another take is "She didn't write this, it is merely a trial balloon for seeing how people react to the idea."
Mine is more "She is writing to get the Left all aligned in arguing for amnesty, ahead of the presumed red wave and inevitable investigations." With a hint of "Damn... I wonder if something big is likely to burst out soon, and someone is worried a lot of people are going to look like they need hanging..."
Taking her piece at face value as a reasonable "hey, let's let byegones be byegones" is missing the interesting meat, which is "Oster seems really worried... why?"
Burns should say "parties." To partisan politicize or even to think the problem was level (Federal/State/Local) is wrong. CDC did not provide individuals and other public officials with the information they needed to make proper cost benefit analyses of how to respond to the pandemic. FDA failed to approve vaccines as soon as it should and dragged its feet on approving kits that could have been used for self isolation and test to stay opening/closing of venues. Only a radical re-imagining of PH could have gotten better decisions made in a decentralized way.
Re: the Oster piece, I realize that this blog (and Oster's focus) is largely about public policy, but I understood the column to be more about non-policymakers forgiving other non-policymakers for the sides they took in the million asinine online and offline conflicts that took place during the pandemic. I thought there was a lot to take to heart there, honestly.
I know a lot of people who had family, professional, personal relationships strained because of the various positions they took on masking, school attendance, vaccinations, etc. Whatever decisions we make in terms of voting for people who espoused certain policies or heuristics, I believe that declaring an amnesty (as Oster put it) in our personal lives is a good idea.
There's probably also a lot to learn as voting citizens in analyzing the track records of the thought leaders and policymakers we chose to listen to, and I don't think "they did their best" is a good way to judge governments, but you don't have to live with your government the way you have to live with the people in your community.
You took the words out of my fingers. T & R Commissions end with forgiveness and amnesty, but they begin with finding out the truth, proceed with confession and apology, and only then get to forgiveness.
By figuring out "what went wrong", they also suggest ways to change things, and provide a certain consensus to do so.
If Republicans were interested in the slog of making things better rather than the dopamine hit of insulting their opponents (deserved or not!), they would enable T & R-like entities about a lot of things (e.g., the FBI).
The response to the Oster piece suggesting peace and de-escalation is the right's corollary to the institutional left's response to that Letter on Ukraine. "How dare you?! We're in this for the long haul. Regime change is a must!"
I haven't been following this blog long enough to know any detail of Kling's view on vaccinations or what he thinks should have been done so I can only agree that many mistakes were made. It would have been great if less mistakes were made and maybe the rate of mistakes could have been realistically lower but I'm not at all confident it is reasonable to think there should have been a lot less mistakes. This was a very unique situation with a lot of uncertainty. Mistakes happen, especially when facing new situations. It's easy to critique from the peanut gallery and a lot harder to deal with something like what Covid presented. And I would wholeheartedly agree that CDC made way too many mistakes that reduced confidence and trust in their capabilities and recommendations. That is likely to continue to do harm, hopefully their won't be a severe issue anytime soon where the harm is large.
Beyond that, I think it is useful to divide the response into before vaccinations and after.
Before Vax - Personally, I was a little scared. And I was glad my wife had retired from medicine a year before it all happened. As a very healthy ~60 yr old, I realize my risk was low. Back then I thought it was a bit higher than I now know it was but still low. Either way, I'm glad I didn't get Covid until after I was vaccinated. We also have to remember that hospitals were overloaded for many months and a less conservative approach would have exponentially increased that problem. People are free to disagree but I think the steps that were taken weren't all that far from optimal despite there being lots of mistakes.
After Vax - I wholeheartedly agree there has been too much hesitancy to return to normal. Schools in some states reopened quickly and they should have in all states. Harm to kids (and their parents) was far greater by not reopening. CDC guidance should have leaned more towards normalcy. And I say this despite knowing many healthy people in their 70s and older who are still very scared of getting covid and not wanting to judge them and their concern of the risks.
Haven't read Michael Greve article (or book) yet, but your excerpt is spot on. But the repeat players aren't the only players, the system (still) allows disruptors to enter the fray without permission and change the rules of the game. This is why democracy needs it's Andrew Jacksons and Donald Trumps. It doesn't even strictly matter if those guys are good are bad, as long as they disrupt the system without destroying it.
Wow, all round outstanding post. The line of reasoning about competence vs. motive not mattering much...spot on. Aint got the time to diligence one's motives. Trying to read someone's mind is for the birds. Life is too short.
Also agree with you about politicians colluding to game the system. An arms race if you will between professional politicians who spend 24/7 trying yo amass more power/influence/money versus the rest of us.
As Tyler Cowen would say, both ideas substantially under rated
I’d be willing to forgive if there was some expression of repentance on the other side. I don’t think any of these people think their actions were incorrect. That’s the problem. Remorse and recognition of failure are necessary for forgiveness.
YES - forgiveness AFTER the ones who made mistakes admit their actions were wrong, and offer remorse.
Christian forgiveness is a big reason the USA, after the Civil War, continued developing so peacefully. The Democrat KKK folk who continued being racists were not remorseful, and didn't get better.
Elect Republicans and fire the bureaucrats who did this.
My non-negotiable item is that I want control over my kids public school funding. When the education establishment recognizes we need competition to prevent them from doing that again I'll forgive them. I'm not optimistic, I think we will pry that funding from their cold dead hands.
Our private schools were closed here as well. For a while by state order and then the county tried to extend it and the governor overruled them so they opened 6 months earlier.
The private schools by us never closed.
The governor did order them to mask and follow the CDC guidelines, but at least the one we sent our kids to refused.
Which state. Mine is maryland
Maryland had a lost year from Covidiocy. We were spared worse because we had a Republican governor. Gov. Hogan was "Lockdown Larry" the first three months however. I'll never forget his nagging for kids to stay home and not gather at playgrounds, because they had to "Stop the spread." Still waiting for his apology for that mind numbing idiocy.
You have my sympathy.
It reflects poorly on Arnold that he can link to others talking about a short (5 min read?), and not even link to The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/
I read it skeptically, looking for her reasons to "forgive" the decision makers who made bad decisions, but no such reasons were there. Certainly those not seriously harmed by other non-decision makers who disagreed should try to forgive and agree that there wasn't enough info to be so sure of their own positions.
She fails to discus those who were fired for not getting vaccinated; no data on how many lives were saved by the vaccine vs how many were lost - and how the public insistence that the vaccine death rate was 0 is shown to be false by the data. Even we who believe that millions of lives were saved by the vaccine should be able to accept that thousands of lives were adversely affected by the vaccines, with many deaths.
Most of those who criticize her also fail to note how sloppy and uninformative most public discussion of COVID remains, even after almost 3 years.
What is the death rate / what is the death rate per variant (about 100 variants & subvariants)?
How infectious is it?
What are the effective ways to reduce effectiveness?
In any pandemic, what parameters are needed to be known in order to recommend a lockdown?
To mandate a lockdown?
I'm so tired of hearing "news" and "opinion" with almost nobody addressing these key questions.
We know, now, that mistakes were made. Our civilization needs to know a lot more about what those mistakes were, and what the non-mistake (decision) would look like. All alternative decisions will have good and bad points, but the conversation avoids discussing this reality and almost assumes there was some possible "nobody gets hurt" perfect decisions available.
There weren't. We need an honest discussion of what was possible.
Our politicians also need to fire - fire/ punish - those bureaucrats who were not telling the truth. We get honesty by gov't workers, including honestly "not knowing for sure", when dishonesty results in getting fired. We won't get it without the dishonest folk getting fired.
Oster seems to want to get the honesty without firing the liars; and yes, wanting more mothers to vote Dem (like she did in 2020? disastrously) again. I'm pretty sure the Dems will lose big. Not at all sure the gov't liars will be fired - but she's wrong to want them forgiven instead.
> Oster seems to want to get the honesty without firing the liars;
In itself, this is a reasonable strategy. We call it the "blameless post-mortem culture" and it works.
But its a strategy for *preserving* a culture of open and honest accounting. We need to get to step one first.
What bewilders me was that in March 2020 it became unquestionable "fact" that any and all corporate, educational and government actions in response to Covid were justified, no matter how logically flawed. No matter how harmful.
How did this happen?
How do we prevent this type of panic from happening again?
We must not sweep the pandemic response into the closet of history until there is a public reckoning of how public officials got the pandemic response so wrong.
In terms of justice, Fauci’s performance during the pandemic is trivial compared to his hand in creating the virus in the first place. There must be a legal reckoning with the national security state and its authority to fund dangerous virus synthesis.
Yeah, dispositive evidence for or against the lab leak will probably never emerge unless the Chinese Government decides to provide it.
But there is pretty strong case that for senior western scientists conspiring to mislead the public under pressure from the heads of funding agencies. And evidence for that is not in the hands of China.
For me the Amnesty argument isn't about forgiveness, or whether I trust Fauci. I want the FDA, CDC, etc to be able to have honest internal discussions about what went wrong, and how to do better next time. That means they have to be able to start with "This was badly wrong, in important ways" and not expect to be fired or jailed for saying so, which means amnesty. Think "blameless root cause analysis". I'm not sure it will work, but I'm sure that holding out for vengeance will prevent the institutions that most need it from learning or reforming at all, and keep their efforts focused on denial and stubborn insistence that they did the right thing.
People don’t have uncomfortable conversations about what went wrong and how to change unless they have to. They do it to survive.
If you can survive without having those conversations, you won’t.
Jettisoning those that failed is the best way to move forward. The new boss can blame the old boss and admit it was a mistake.
If the entire institution is rotten to the core it needs to die. Creative destruction.
People in everywhere from tech companies to surgeries have "what went wrong" conversations regularly. Those conversations generally get much less honest and informative when people are concerned about personal consequences, especially career survival, because it becomes more important to avoid admitting wrongdoing (even honest error) than to accurately describe what happened.
I don't think that the failure is limited to bosses here, and I doubt a replacement of the leadership would accomplish much. There are a lot of procedures here that need to be scrapped or reformed, and even the best candidate for incoming boss would need the data from an RCA like that to know which ones to target and how.
As to the final point, my prior is strongly with FDA Delenda Est, and CDC Delenda Est while we're at it. But I recognize that those are politically nonstarters, and am trying to focus on a strategy with a plausible theory of victory.
> People in everywhere from tech companies to surgeries have "what went wrong" conversations regularly.
The blameless-analysis culture is a way of preserving this kind of norm where it already exists. Whereas it won't make anyone 'fess up anything if they already are bent on getting away with something.
If you have a hitherto successful cover-up that looks like cracking you need to be much more tactical. Identify a likely grass, and give them immunity in return for information. But for that you need a serious threat hanging over all the bad guys. We are very far from that point yet.
Who treated you as lepers, and who would you be asked to forgive? I tend to think that forgiveness is personal, and requires being asked for.
Amnesty, as an official moratorium on punishment, specifically for the purpose of improving institutional performance, is a different thing. I am broadly in favor of amnesty, in the "I don't care about punishing people, I care about doing better going forward" sense.
My school board behaved very poorly during COVID. A possible remedy was that the new governor asked for all the board seats to be up for election this November rather than staggered over many years, but this was stymied by the Democrats. Moving on to me means being able to elect a new school board that rejects what happened during the pandemic.
Similarly, my friends school boards decision not to mask was overridden by the state health board. I think all members of the state health board should be fired and disbarred from ever holding public position again.
I don't see how keeping these people around helps us to "move on" or perform better next time.
This reads as someone who needs an amnesty.
As I have written in several forums about Oster's pleading for forgetfulness, "Let's not bicker and argue over oo killed oo."
Kriss is clearly very high IQ, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn he has bipolar, schizophrenic, or autism spectrum relatives. Even many bright people will tend towards rhyming cyclicality of historicity drawn from nuggets in the information tsunami and this will be mixed with confirmation and hindsight bias and maybe the mirror of narcissus. I don't doubt the death of the current internet in some fashion. Does the internet of now look like 10 years ago, 20 years ago? It will be an evolution not a declining winking out of existence, even if that evolution is sped up to where we can see it before our eyes in real time if we are those blessed with the genetic lottery winnings of a longer memory. And this evolution will be informed by the past and the present and the future in a mix that someone is probably going to see coming, perhaps even someone we have never heard of. Also, Goia seems correct this is just the death of clickbait/internet, a reasserting of everyones story hungry mind, and the winners are those that can satisfy this, ie. youtube and substack.
Yes, I am not sure why Kriss claims that woke is done, but... has he looked at universities or corporations lately? Last I checked they are not cutting back on DEI spending, and in fact universities are upping their instances of job postings for which only minorities and women should apply. Maybe woke is less hip and cool than it was, but only because it has become too normal.
I am always less sure about corporations, but universities currently and peak woke are not necessarily inconsistent if it is a long and variable lag combined with advancing one funeral at a time. If the wokest faculty are 30 to 40 year old tenure holders they have a few decades to go. Again I have no ability to judge this and am not in this universe, I have just seen others that know academia talk about the vibe shift in the real world and say academia will be woke for another 50 years regardless due to these institutional/structural factors.
That's the thing, peak woke and woke being over are two very different things. Especially considering the universities are the indoctrination machines driving woke everywhere else, another 50 years of it being stuffed in every administrating requirement, job application and all the heads of departments means we have another 50 years of students being indoctrinated and going out into the world. That's a long tail end.
We can hope that corporation will start pushing back against woke and perhaps knock it out of new employees/college grads, but then we said that way back at the beginning of the woke wave, and instead of "the real world" sorting the problem we saw the woke create the clown world we live in.
Arnold, you ought to read the Oster piece yourself. It is short. More importantly, it isn't really what it says on the tin. What exactly it is is a bit interesting to think about.
Gonna have to disagree on that. I went and read it and found Oster can't even follow her own advice. She writes, "Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach?
To which I say, No, the public-health community didn't have to do that.
I interpret her to be is implicitly saying "please continue to vote Democrat and support the Teacher's Unions that threw your kids under the bus".
See, that's just it, the interesting question is "Why did she write this? Did she even write this? What is going on?"
Sarah Reynolds has an interesting take, a bit of a psychological analysis.
https://sarahreynolds.substack.com/p/everyone-is-talking-about-emily-oster
Another take is "She didn't write this, it is merely a trial balloon for seeing how people react to the idea."
Mine is more "She is writing to get the Left all aligned in arguing for amnesty, ahead of the presumed red wave and inevitable investigations." With a hint of "Damn... I wonder if something big is likely to burst out soon, and someone is worried a lot of people are going to look like they need hanging..."
Taking her piece at face value as a reasonable "hey, let's let byegones be byegones" is missing the interesting meat, which is "Oster seems really worried... why?"
I guess I can see that as being a really possible explanation of motive.
Burns should say "parties." To partisan politicize or even to think the problem was level (Federal/State/Local) is wrong. CDC did not provide individuals and other public officials with the information they needed to make proper cost benefit analyses of how to respond to the pandemic. FDA failed to approve vaccines as soon as it should and dragged its feet on approving kits that could have been used for self isolation and test to stay opening/closing of venues. Only a radical re-imagining of PH could have gotten better decisions made in a decentralized way.
Re: the Oster piece, I realize that this blog (and Oster's focus) is largely about public policy, but I understood the column to be more about non-policymakers forgiving other non-policymakers for the sides they took in the million asinine online and offline conflicts that took place during the pandemic. I thought there was a lot to take to heart there, honestly.
I know a lot of people who had family, professional, personal relationships strained because of the various positions they took on masking, school attendance, vaccinations, etc. Whatever decisions we make in terms of voting for people who espoused certain policies or heuristics, I believe that declaring an amnesty (as Oster put it) in our personal lives is a good idea.
There's probably also a lot to learn as voting citizens in analyzing the track records of the thought leaders and policymakers we chose to listen to, and I don't think "they did their best" is a good way to judge governments, but you don't have to live with your government the way you have to live with the people in your community.
Perhaps what is needed is a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Good luck with that.
You took the words out of my fingers. T & R Commissions end with forgiveness and amnesty, but they begin with finding out the truth, proceed with confession and apology, and only then get to forgiveness.
By figuring out "what went wrong", they also suggest ways to change things, and provide a certain consensus to do so.
If Republicans were interested in the slog of making things better rather than the dopamine hit of insulting their opponents (deserved or not!), they would enable T & R-like entities about a lot of things (e.g., the FBI).
The response to the Oster piece suggesting peace and de-escalation is the right's corollary to the institutional left's response to that Letter on Ukraine. "How dare you?! We're in this for the long haul. Regime change is a must!"
I haven't been following this blog long enough to know any detail of Kling's view on vaccinations or what he thinks should have been done so I can only agree that many mistakes were made. It would have been great if less mistakes were made and maybe the rate of mistakes could have been realistically lower but I'm not at all confident it is reasonable to think there should have been a lot less mistakes. This was a very unique situation with a lot of uncertainty. Mistakes happen, especially when facing new situations. It's easy to critique from the peanut gallery and a lot harder to deal with something like what Covid presented. And I would wholeheartedly agree that CDC made way too many mistakes that reduced confidence and trust in their capabilities and recommendations. That is likely to continue to do harm, hopefully their won't be a severe issue anytime soon where the harm is large.
Beyond that, I think it is useful to divide the response into before vaccinations and after.
Before Vax - Personally, I was a little scared. And I was glad my wife had retired from medicine a year before it all happened. As a very healthy ~60 yr old, I realize my risk was low. Back then I thought it was a bit higher than I now know it was but still low. Either way, I'm glad I didn't get Covid until after I was vaccinated. We also have to remember that hospitals were overloaded for many months and a less conservative approach would have exponentially increased that problem. People are free to disagree but I think the steps that were taken weren't all that far from optimal despite there being lots of mistakes.
After Vax - I wholeheartedly agree there has been too much hesitancy to return to normal. Schools in some states reopened quickly and they should have in all states. Harm to kids (and their parents) was far greater by not reopening. CDC guidance should have leaned more towards normalcy. And I say this despite knowing many healthy people in their 70s and older who are still very scared of getting covid and not wanting to judge them and their concern of the risks.
Haven't read Michael Greve article (or book) yet, but your excerpt is spot on. But the repeat players aren't the only players, the system (still) allows disruptors to enter the fray without permission and change the rules of the game. This is why democracy needs it's Andrew Jacksons and Donald Trumps. It doesn't even strictly matter if those guys are good are bad, as long as they disrupt the system without destroying it.
Wow, all round outstanding post. The line of reasoning about competence vs. motive not mattering much...spot on. Aint got the time to diligence one's motives. Trying to read someone's mind is for the birds. Life is too short.
Also agree with you about politicians colluding to game the system. An arms race if you will between professional politicians who spend 24/7 trying yo amass more power/influence/money versus the rest of us.
As Tyler Cowen would say, both ideas substantially under rated
"That includes people who love Fauci forgiving the rest of us, too."
"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
This does NOT imply however denying that sins ARE sins.