"But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals?"
Think about this for a little bit and you will rapidly see the reason any general lockdowns were doomed to fail if your plan is to 'stop the spread' or even slow it down.
Who is staffing those hospitals? You need doctors, nurses, and support staff like janitors. They need supplies of all sorts as well as food so you need to deliver those, too. You need to keep the lights on so you need the people who run and maintain power plants, and electric and natural gas distribution systems, as well as coal for plants that use it. They need supplies, too, that need to be delivered. Those supply deliveries come from all over so you need to support all the people operating transportation systems. Stuff breaks down (MV Dali has entered the chat) so now you need to have mechanics and supply them with parts to perform repairs. Need I go on, and I haven't even started on where you're getting the food to distribute. The best estimates I've seen are that most urban areas have less then a week's supply of food on hand so you're not going to lock down for more than a few days at best, certainly less than a month and probably not even the magic two weeks (another number Brix and Fauci likely pulled out of their nethers, like six feet.)
On the other hand, maybe they didn't fail because they were designed to give the feeling of being protected to the people who were demanding the most protection, the laptop class (and teachers unions). If those deplorables would have just known their place was to risk infection, illness, and death so the laptop class could stay sequestered everything would have been fine.
Re: "the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end." — Rob Henderson
This seems mistaken. Genes don't have "an end." States of nature have causes, not ends. Key causes are mechanisms in natural evolution — genetic variation and environmental selection for reproductive fitness.
My intuition is that happiness, usually, is a mental state that is a by-product (side-effect) of other pursuits.
Happiness may be momentary and occasional. Or it may be settled. Some persons are blessed with a sunny disposition. And some persons just want to be unhappy.
Sometimes, one's own happiness is a conscious end (intentional goal), when one forms a long-range plan for a life well-lived, in the belief that such a course will make oneself happy.
Sometimes, the happiness of others is one's goal — and one might find one's own happiness, too, in the end, as a happy by-product of altruism.
"Early in the pandemic, I called for a military-style lockdown. It was a “go big or go home” argument."
There was no pandemic until the government and major institutions created one with lockdowns.
We know this because we lived it! Life was going along perfectly normal and then doing the unthinkable - shutting down to "hide from a virus" - was embraced as the way forward. And yet at the time this plan was launched there was no evidence of a pandemic in the United States nor in most of the world! All that existed was two anecdotes: Wuhan and Lombardy. Yet these two anecdotes became the rational for the American and Western officials to embrace the most self-destructive social policy in the history of the modern world.
The great lie of the Pandemic was that a pandemic existed prior to the greatest interruption ever being imposed on the American people. But once the lockdowns / shutdowns happened and mass testing was initiated, then all of a sudden thousands and tens of thousands were dying of a virus that we literally know now was circulating for months before.
What does it mean that the Covid virus was circulating in the United States months before March 2020? It means we were deceived. It means we were fooled. It means we pointed the gun at ourselves and fired.
slavery and gender inequality - It's a nice theory and I'm not inclined to disagree but it would be nice to know how that compares to the Americas pre-colonial. Maybe some Asian areas too.
Gender inequality is nearly worldwide. I suppose at one time slavery was too, though maybe a bit less so [than gender inequality] in the last thousand years. How does one compare the resulting [gender] inequality in Africa to somewhere "different"?
> I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid
1. You need to calculate QALYs instead of "lives lost". An 85 year old with dementia dying a few months early is not the same as an 18 year old athlete dying in a car crash.
2. You need to calculate the *costs*, not just the benefits of a lockdown. I.e. the current wave of inflation is one such cost.
And by every imaginable calculation the "let it rip" option comes out on top.
It's truly wild that after everything humanity has learned about respiratory illnesses over the last century -- (not to mention the last 4 years) people still think you can stop the spread of a submicroscopic aerosolized virus through central planning or any other means.
The hope that a severe two week lockdown, or the milder approach of “test and trace”, would be able to eradicate a virus that spreads as fast as flu and had already made global inroads was always a very costly pipe dream. The fact that COVID wasn’t eradicated is no one’s failure.
Have they ever gotten around yet to figuring out how much Covid mortality was actually iatrogenic as a result of intubation? The last I read, "these data suggest that the magnitude of the relationship between intubation and death is dynamic and that continued research and clinical guidance is needed as SARS-CoV-2 evolves." From January 2023 at https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)00160-5/fulltext
Evans tells an interesting and thought-provoking story. She draws on an impressive range of descriptive books and papers. But I am not quite sure that some of causation that she attributes to the patriarchal intuition is persuasive. Might other factors also be at least as relevant, and have patterns similar to what she describes produced different stories elsewhere? In particular, I wonder about the notion that
“Terrified civilians usually want big strong patriarchs. When people are under attack, they typically seek macho leaders.” So maybe it might be worth pondering a bit and asking some questions to consider how well it harmonizes with some possible priors and if not what information might help us to achieve a reconciliation.
My personal just-so story that is that corvee labor was the first form of taxation, corvee labor preceded slavery, and that the different models of slavery that evolved from corvee labor across different early civilizations were influenced by the common as well as diverse religious beliefs of those civilizations. My story of human flourishing can thus be understood in a framework of anti-populist versus populist intuitions and struggles, with much of human progress attributable to populist wins.
So I am left pondering at the moment whether Evans’ story is consistent with some of the other things we may tend to believe described below.
Wikipedia‘s entry on the history of slavery includes a cite to Sean Stilwell in "Slavery in African History", Slavery and Slaving in African History” (2013) for the proposition that “For most Africans between 10000 BCE to 500 CE, the use of slaves was not an optimal political or economic strategy. But in some places, Africans came to see the value of slavery. In the large parts of the continent where Africans lived in relatively decentralized and small-scale communities, some big men used slavery to grab power to get around broader governing ideas about reciprocity and kinship, but were still bound by those ideas to some degree. In other parts of the continent early political centralization and commercialization led to expanded use use of slaves as soldiers, officials, and workers.”
This seems to fit with some cites to an entry by Peter Hunt in the Cambridge World History. Among these:
“Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity.”
“Slavery was a widespread institution in the ancient world (1200 BCE – 900 CE). Slaves could be found in simpler societies, but more important and better known was the existence of slavery in most advanced states. Indeed, it is hard to find any ancient civilizations in which some slavery did not exist. Slave use was sometimes extensive.”
And indeed in major slave societies like Athens and the Roman Empire, slaves made up the majority of the labor force the first true slave society in history emerged in ancient Greece between the 6th and 4th centuries. In Athens during the classical period, a third to a half of the population consisted of slaves. Rome would become even more dependent on slavery. Yet the slave raids that provided this labor were not in Africa, but predominantly in Europe. An illustrative example:
“One of Ireland’s greatest commodities at this time [2d - 5th century AD] was human slaves. The country was a prominent slave-trading centre, and many of the slaves who worked on the farms of the wealthy villa-owning elite in Roman Britain are thought to have started life in Hibernia. With the sharp decline of the Roman empire during the fifth century, the tables were turned, with captives from Britain now heading west across the Irish Sea to work as slaves on Irish farms. Ireland’s position as a major maritime slave-trading hub would later be reignited during the Viking Age.” (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-did-the-romans-ever-do-for-ireland-1.4205876 )
Barry Cunliffe observes:
“The scale of the slave trade between African and the Roman world is difficult to judge, but an order of magnitude can be offered. It is estimated that the slave population of the Roman world in the second century AD was between five and ten million requiring between a quarter and a half million replacements a year to sustain that level...in the order of fifty thousand to two hundred thousand would have to be acquired from outside the empire every year. Since black slaves were always in a minority in the Roman world, sub-Saharan Africa will only have contributed only a small percentage to this number. In the medieval period, three to five thousand slaves a year were transported to the markets in Europe and the Near East. A figure in this range, or perhaps a little higher, would probably be in the right order for the Roman period.” (Facing the Sea of Sand, p. 177)
And yet polygny didn’t take root in Europe. Slavs didn’t adopt it even though they were the major source of slaves in the Arab world alongside some 9 million Africans who were also imported as slaves. (https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/ ). Something to think some more about perhaps. And in this line it appears to difficult to reconcile Evans’ narrative with the complicated and fascinating
Religion might be a possible factor in understanding some of the phenomena Evans describes.
Happen to have Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City open at the moment and it is interesting to think about the implications of the equality of souls he writes about regarding Greek funerary rites. And archaeologists confirm the existence of the lavish gold grave goods in female as well as male tombs. One wonders if it might be worth learning about African funerary rites relative to men and women.
On the feminist front, Queen Esther is always first to spring to mind when considering women and slavery, but there are many African queens and empresses who don’t seem to fit nicely into Evans’ narrative. A browser search of “African queen” will provide dozens of articles like: https://briefly.co.za/78029-top-10-powerful-african-queens-about.html
but a few examples I find particularly interesting:
under whom a “combination of regular warfare, disease, difficult forced labor and harsh trials by ordeal using a poisonous nut from the Tangena shrub resulted in a high mortality rate among both soldiers and civilians during her 33-year reign, with Madagascar's population reducing from 5 million in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1839.”
-Mentewab, 1706-1773, a powerful Empress of Ethiopia during the regencies of her son, noted as
“Enlightened and liberal, she was successful in her church policy of reconciliation between the followers of the two main competing monastic orders, and her reign was characterized by religious peace.” (https://dacb.org/stories/ethiopia/mentewab/ )
So, for whatever it might be worth, Evans’ narrative is illuminating and interesting, however, I just not yet ready to swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Lockdowns - If one looks at the countries with lowest mortality rates, the list is dominated by warm weather countries with islands thrown in (also mostly warm except Iceland and Greenland) and maybe a handful of highly authoritarian or compliant countries. US is none of these.
I suspect that Kling's idea of military lockdowns with soldiers delivering meals and running people to hospitals is far from practical. Over the horizon, you can't see practical from here kind of far. The supply chain itself wouldn't be able to hold up. The total number of US military personnel is something like 1.5 million all in. There are approximately 126 million house holds across the US. Even assuming the government has enough food on hand or readily available to feed the entire population for two weeks without having access to private warehouses and stores (because remember, all those people are locked down) that is a little under 100 deliveries per military personnel (active and reserve) to be made over two weeks.
And that is before considering that some of those soldiers are necessary somewhere else, like foreign bases. How many are going to be needed to organize the process on an ongoing basis? How many are going to be needed to be on hand to repair the trucks when they break down? How many are going to be operating dispatch? How many are keeping track of who has delivered what to whom? How many are going to be fielding calls from citizens saying they didn't get a delivery? How many are going to be needed to pack, organize and load out all the food supplies to be delivered?
You will be lucky if if that number doesn't go to 200-400 deliveries per delivering soldier, and more likely it will be in the 800s. Supply chain is really hard, and the US military does not have the infrastructure to get all this done.
Oh, and a fair bit of those house holds are not even in well mapped, legible cities. Some are going to be in pokey little apartments that are hard to find from the street. Some are going to be in rural areas in the middle of no where that just barely have GPS addresses. That all slows things down considerably.
How many people are going to starve over the course of two weeks because the military couldn't find their front door, didn't realize there was someone living there, or just failed to deliver but thought they did?
The task might not be impossible, but a huge amount of infrastructure would have to be in place before you could even begin to attempt it without guaranteed failure.
Not so much "half baked" as mis-baked. Restrictions on movement and venue closings should first of all be con on the basis of local conditions, not even state and surly not national and second on the basis of risks of a particular kind of space (ventilation, crowding, etc.), not the activity conducted there. But CDC never gave local decisionmakers the information they could have used to take cost effective action. FDA's foot dragging meant we did not have cheap screening tests for self isolation, and test to enter regimes. Likewise (CDC or FDA?) resistance to first shot first and fractional dosing when vaccine were in restricted supply.
Vaccines mandates? In principle they are acceptable if they prevent transmission, but that was never clear.
LIkewise we never got a clear massage abut who was being protected by masking of different kind of masks.
Thanks to these CDC/FDA errors, the response became symbolic and political, not cost effective.
“I’m not here to praise the Founders—they were at best wise barbarians.” What is a wise barbarian? And compared to Trump or Obama or Biden? I’ll take the Founders.
“Despite recent missteps at some high-profile universities, our education system still ranks at the top in the world. Eight of the 10 best schools globally are located in the U.S. Education, along with opportunity, make this country coveted among immigrants.” What does highly ranked even mean? Like Tyler Cowen says, our universities are dysfunctional. They are also highly politically biased and vulnerable to disruption. I am not a fan of our universities.
“We also need to create opportunities for anti-aging research, enhance ecosystems through wildlife corridors…”. He finishes with a long list of planner/mentality ideas. I’m completely against this type of thinking. We need more freedom not more planning.
"But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals?"
Think about this for a little bit and you will rapidly see the reason any general lockdowns were doomed to fail if your plan is to 'stop the spread' or even slow it down.
Who is staffing those hospitals? You need doctors, nurses, and support staff like janitors. They need supplies of all sorts as well as food so you need to deliver those, too. You need to keep the lights on so you need the people who run and maintain power plants, and electric and natural gas distribution systems, as well as coal for plants that use it. They need supplies, too, that need to be delivered. Those supply deliveries come from all over so you need to support all the people operating transportation systems. Stuff breaks down (MV Dali has entered the chat) so now you need to have mechanics and supply them with parts to perform repairs. Need I go on, and I haven't even started on where you're getting the food to distribute. The best estimates I've seen are that most urban areas have less then a week's supply of food on hand so you're not going to lock down for more than a few days at best, certainly less than a month and probably not even the magic two weeks (another number Brix and Fauci likely pulled out of their nethers, like six feet.)
On the other hand, maybe they didn't fail because they were designed to give the feeling of being protected to the people who were demanding the most protection, the laptop class (and teachers unions). If those deplorables would have just known their place was to risk infection, illness, and death so the laptop class could stay sequestered everything would have been fine.
Re: "the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end." — Rob Henderson
This seems mistaken. Genes don't have "an end." States of nature have causes, not ends. Key causes are mechanisms in natural evolution — genetic variation and environmental selection for reproductive fitness.
My intuition is that happiness, usually, is a mental state that is a by-product (side-effect) of other pursuits.
Happiness may be momentary and occasional. Or it may be settled. Some persons are blessed with a sunny disposition. And some persons just want to be unhappy.
Sometimes, one's own happiness is a conscious end (intentional goal), when one forms a long-range plan for a life well-lived, in the belief that such a course will make oneself happy.
Sometimes, the happiness of others is one's goal — and one might find one's own happiness, too, in the end, as a happy by-product of altruism.
"Early in the pandemic, I called for a military-style lockdown. It was a “go big or go home” argument."
There was no pandemic until the government and major institutions created one with lockdowns.
We know this because we lived it! Life was going along perfectly normal and then doing the unthinkable - shutting down to "hide from a virus" - was embraced as the way forward. And yet at the time this plan was launched there was no evidence of a pandemic in the United States nor in most of the world! All that existed was two anecdotes: Wuhan and Lombardy. Yet these two anecdotes became the rational for the American and Western officials to embrace the most self-destructive social policy in the history of the modern world.
The great lie of the Pandemic was that a pandemic existed prior to the greatest interruption ever being imposed on the American people. But once the lockdowns / shutdowns happened and mass testing was initiated, then all of a sudden thousands and tens of thousands were dying of a virus that we literally know now was circulating for months before.
What does it mean that the Covid virus was circulating in the United States months before March 2020? It means we were deceived. It means we were fooled. It means we pointed the gun at ourselves and fired.
The recent release of secret German CDC documents warning against a lockdown places the topic in an interesting light. Interesting that what happened behind the scenes there is so similar to what happened here. https://www.rmx.news/germany/secret-documents-reveal-germanys-public-health-agency-warned-lockdowns-cause-more-harm-than-good/
slavery and gender inequality - It's a nice theory and I'm not inclined to disagree but it would be nice to know how that compares to the Americas pre-colonial. Maybe some Asian areas too.
Gender inequality is nearly worldwide. I suppose at one time slavery was too, though maybe a bit less so [than gender inequality] in the last thousand years. How does one compare the resulting [gender] inequality in Africa to somewhere "different"?
> I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid
1. You need to calculate QALYs instead of "lives lost". An 85 year old with dementia dying a few months early is not the same as an 18 year old athlete dying in a car crash.
2. You need to calculate the *costs*, not just the benefits of a lockdown. I.e. the current wave of inflation is one such cost.
And by every imaginable calculation the "let it rip" option comes out on top.
It's truly wild that after everything humanity has learned about respiratory illnesses over the last century -- (not to mention the last 4 years) people still think you can stop the spread of a submicroscopic aerosolized virus through central planning or any other means.
The hope that a severe two week lockdown, or the milder approach of “test and trace”, would be able to eradicate a virus that spreads as fast as flu and had already made global inroads was always a very costly pipe dream. The fact that COVID wasn’t eradicated is no one’s failure.
Have they ever gotten around yet to figuring out how much Covid mortality was actually iatrogenic as a result of intubation? The last I read, "these data suggest that the magnitude of the relationship between intubation and death is dynamic and that continued research and clinical guidance is needed as SARS-CoV-2 evolves." From January 2023 at https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)00160-5/fulltext
Evans tells an interesting and thought-provoking story. She draws on an impressive range of descriptive books and papers. But I am not quite sure that some of causation that she attributes to the patriarchal intuition is persuasive. Might other factors also be at least as relevant, and have patterns similar to what she describes produced different stories elsewhere? In particular, I wonder about the notion that
“Terrified civilians usually want big strong patriarchs. When people are under attack, they typically seek macho leaders.” So maybe it might be worth pondering a bit and asking some questions to consider how well it harmonizes with some possible priors and if not what information might help us to achieve a reconciliation.
My personal just-so story that is that corvee labor was the first form of taxation, corvee labor preceded slavery, and that the different models of slavery that evolved from corvee labor across different early civilizations were influenced by the common as well as diverse religious beliefs of those civilizations. My story of human flourishing can thus be understood in a framework of anti-populist versus populist intuitions and struggles, with much of human progress attributable to populist wins.
So I am left pondering at the moment whether Evans’ story is consistent with some of the other things we may tend to believe described below.
Wikipedia‘s entry on the history of slavery includes a cite to Sean Stilwell in "Slavery in African History", Slavery and Slaving in African History” (2013) for the proposition that “For most Africans between 10000 BCE to 500 CE, the use of slaves was not an optimal political or economic strategy. But in some places, Africans came to see the value of slavery. In the large parts of the continent where Africans lived in relatively decentralized and small-scale communities, some big men used slavery to grab power to get around broader governing ideas about reciprocity and kinship, but were still bound by those ideas to some degree. In other parts of the continent early political centralization and commercialization led to expanded use use of slaves as soldiers, officials, and workers.”
This seems to fit with some cites to an entry by Peter Hunt in the Cambridge World History. Among these:
“Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity.”
“Slavery was a widespread institution in the ancient world (1200 BCE – 900 CE). Slaves could be found in simpler societies, but more important and better known was the existence of slavery in most advanced states. Indeed, it is hard to find any ancient civilizations in which some slavery did not exist. Slave use was sometimes extensive.”
And indeed in major slave societies like Athens and the Roman Empire, slaves made up the majority of the labor force the first true slave society in history emerged in ancient Greece between the 6th and 4th centuries. In Athens during the classical period, a third to a half of the population consisted of slaves. Rome would become even more dependent on slavery. Yet the slave raids that provided this labor were not in Africa, but predominantly in Europe. An illustrative example:
“One of Ireland’s greatest commodities at this time [2d - 5th century AD] was human slaves. The country was a prominent slave-trading centre, and many of the slaves who worked on the farms of the wealthy villa-owning elite in Roman Britain are thought to have started life in Hibernia. With the sharp decline of the Roman empire during the fifth century, the tables were turned, with captives from Britain now heading west across the Irish Sea to work as slaves on Irish farms. Ireland’s position as a major maritime slave-trading hub would later be reignited during the Viking Age.” (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-did-the-romans-ever-do-for-ireland-1.4205876 )
Barry Cunliffe observes:
“The scale of the slave trade between African and the Roman world is difficult to judge, but an order of magnitude can be offered. It is estimated that the slave population of the Roman world in the second century AD was between five and ten million requiring between a quarter and a half million replacements a year to sustain that level...in the order of fifty thousand to two hundred thousand would have to be acquired from outside the empire every year. Since black slaves were always in a minority in the Roman world, sub-Saharan Africa will only have contributed only a small percentage to this number. In the medieval period, three to five thousand slaves a year were transported to the markets in Europe and the Near East. A figure in this range, or perhaps a little higher, would probably be in the right order for the Roman period.” (Facing the Sea of Sand, p. 177)
And yet polygny didn’t take root in Europe. Slavs didn’t adopt it even though they were the major source of slaves in the Arab world alongside some 9 million Africans who were also imported as slaves. (https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/ ). Something to think some more about perhaps. And in this line it appears to difficult to reconcile Evans’ narrative with the complicated and fascinating
history of slavery in Ethiopia,
where slave raiding seems to have been indigenous and not export oriented. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ethiopia )
Religion might be a possible factor in understanding some of the phenomena Evans describes.
Happen to have Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City open at the moment and it is interesting to think about the implications of the equality of souls he writes about regarding Greek funerary rites. And archaeologists confirm the existence of the lavish gold grave goods in female as well as male tombs. One wonders if it might be worth learning about African funerary rites relative to men and women.
On the feminist front, Queen Esther is always first to spring to mind when considering women and slavery, but there are many African queens and empresses who don’t seem to fit nicely into Evans’ narrative. A browser search of “African queen” will provide dozens of articles like: https://briefly.co.za/78029-top-10-powerful-african-queens-about.html
but a few examples I find particularly interesting:
-The 7th century Berber queen Kahina ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahina ) ,who fought the Muslim conquest in modern day Libya.
-Ranavalona I of Madagascar (1828– 1861) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranavalona_I )
under whom a “combination of regular warfare, disease, difficult forced labor and harsh trials by ordeal using a poisonous nut from the Tangena shrub resulted in a high mortality rate among both soldiers and civilians during her 33-year reign, with Madagascar's population reducing from 5 million in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1839.”
-Mentewab, 1706-1773, a powerful Empress of Ethiopia during the regencies of her son, noted as
“Enlightened and liberal, she was successful in her church policy of reconciliation between the followers of the two main competing monastic orders, and her reign was characterized by religious peace.” (https://dacb.org/stories/ethiopia/mentewab/ )
So, for whatever it might be worth, Evans’ narrative is illuminating and interesting, however, I just not yet ready to swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Lockdowns - If one looks at the countries with lowest mortality rates, the list is dominated by warm weather countries with islands thrown in (also mostly warm except Iceland and Greenland) and maybe a handful of highly authoritarian or compliant countries. US is none of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
I suspect that Kling's idea of military lockdowns with soldiers delivering meals and running people to hospitals is far from practical. Over the horizon, you can't see practical from here kind of far. The supply chain itself wouldn't be able to hold up. The total number of US military personnel is something like 1.5 million all in. There are approximately 126 million house holds across the US. Even assuming the government has enough food on hand or readily available to feed the entire population for two weeks without having access to private warehouses and stores (because remember, all those people are locked down) that is a little under 100 deliveries per military personnel (active and reserve) to be made over two weeks.
And that is before considering that some of those soldiers are necessary somewhere else, like foreign bases. How many are going to be needed to organize the process on an ongoing basis? How many are going to be needed to be on hand to repair the trucks when they break down? How many are going to be operating dispatch? How many are keeping track of who has delivered what to whom? How many are going to be fielding calls from citizens saying they didn't get a delivery? How many are going to be needed to pack, organize and load out all the food supplies to be delivered?
You will be lucky if if that number doesn't go to 200-400 deliveries per delivering soldier, and more likely it will be in the 800s. Supply chain is really hard, and the US military does not have the infrastructure to get all this done.
Oh, and a fair bit of those house holds are not even in well mapped, legible cities. Some are going to be in pokey little apartments that are hard to find from the street. Some are going to be in rural areas in the middle of no where that just barely have GPS addresses. That all slows things down considerably.
How many people are going to starve over the course of two weeks because the military couldn't find their front door, didn't realize there was someone living there, or just failed to deliver but thought they did?
The task might not be impossible, but a huge amount of infrastructure would have to be in place before you could even begin to attempt it without guaranteed failure.
Not so much "half baked" as mis-baked. Restrictions on movement and venue closings should first of all be con on the basis of local conditions, not even state and surly not national and second on the basis of risks of a particular kind of space (ventilation, crowding, etc.), not the activity conducted there. But CDC never gave local decisionmakers the information they could have used to take cost effective action. FDA's foot dragging meant we did not have cheap screening tests for self isolation, and test to enter regimes. Likewise (CDC or FDA?) resistance to first shot first and fractional dosing when vaccine were in restricted supply.
Vaccines mandates? In principle they are acceptable if they prevent transmission, but that was never clear.
LIkewise we never got a clear massage abut who was being protected by masking of different kind of masks.
Thanks to these CDC/FDA errors, the response became symbolic and political, not cost effective.
See [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors]
Arnold - I hope you won’t call for military style lockdowns again and if you do, I hope people ignore you. Better to listen to Vinay Prisad.
The Will Rinehart piece is a mixed bag.
“I’m not here to praise the Founders—they were at best wise barbarians.” What is a wise barbarian? And compared to Trump or Obama or Biden? I’ll take the Founders.
“Despite recent missteps at some high-profile universities, our education system still ranks at the top in the world. Eight of the 10 best schools globally are located in the U.S. Education, along with opportunity, make this country coveted among immigrants.” What does highly ranked even mean? Like Tyler Cowen says, our universities are dysfunctional. They are also highly politically biased and vulnerable to disruption. I am not a fan of our universities.
“We also need to create opportunities for anti-aging research, enhance ecosystems through wildlife corridors…”. He finishes with a long list of planner/mentality ideas. I’m completely against this type of thinking. We need more freedom not more planning.