Public Health Midwits, 2/3
When the Great Barrington Declaration urging a return to normal behavior came out, we were just months away from vaccines being widely available, and that fact was quite foreseeable. The cost of delaying some things by several months would have been pretty low. . .
Today, though, the situation has flipped for two reasons.
Vaccination lowers the risk of doing stuff.
Vaccination reduces the benefit of delaying stuff into the future.
And it’s on the second point where I think a lot of public health analysts have lost the plot.
He says that this is because public health officials have only narrow expertise, and decisions regarding COVID require broader intellectual skills, including an ability to see costs and benefits in the larger picture.
I think that public officials do not have any expertise, specialized or general. They are Midwits, meaning that they have fancy credentials but mediocre intelligence. As Tyler Cowen wrote early in the pandemic, “What are their average GRE scores?”
Just a few weeks into the pandemic, I wrote What I Have Come to Believe. These were nine inferences that I had drawn that admittedly were tentative. Of those, only my pessimism about the ability to develop a vaccine was misplaced. Pretty much every other inference proved to be correct, and it took the Midwits in public health much longer to arrive at them. To this day, they don’t get some of them.
The institutions that have committed the worst offenses against rationality in their COVID policy have been colleges and public schools. We should not be surprised by this, given that Midwits dominate the administrations of these institutions.
Public health officials, college administrators, and teachers’ union leaders are not experts within their narrow field. They are Midwits who exercised way more power than usual the past two years. We should have dismissed them as impostors then, and we need to do so now.
I'm coming to the conclusion that it's a mistake to attribute most of the bad decisions of politicians and administrators to "mediocre intelligence".
In fact, "intelligence" is practically fetishisized on all directions of the political spectrum (and my saying it's relatively unimportant will be seen as heresy at some level). But... here's a brain teaser for all you smarty-pants:
If your IQ is 100, 2+2=4.
If your IQ is 135, 2+2=4.
The person with the 135 IQ doesn't do any better at coming to the conclusion that 2+2=4 than the 100 IQ person.
Despite how they may flatter themselves by thinking they're dealing with "complex" and "difficult" problems, the overwhelming number of calculations that almost everyone makes are of the blindingly obvious "2+2=4" variety.
To wit... look at the conclusions Arnold reached a few weeks into the pandemic. He reached them, I reached them, you reached them, everyone reached them. They didn't take any special intelligence to reach.
The failure to head these conclusions (and most other problems in life) and act accordingly isn't a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of psychology and incentives. The dominant characteristic of today's Midwit isn't a crippling lack of intelligence, it's irrational fear and the ability to externalize most of the costs on others.
Matt Yglesias writes:
"When the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] urging a return to normal behavior came out, we were just months away from vaccines being widely available, and that fact was quite foreseeable. The cost of delaying some things by several months would have been pretty low [...]"
Three issues:
1) Yglesias asserts that the GBD urged a return to normal behavior. This is a half-truth. The GBD makes a case for focussed protection of vulnerable demographics:
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19." (GBD)
2) Yglesias asserts that it was quite foreseeable, when the GBD was published, that vaccines would be widely available soon ("just months"). This is questionable. The GBD was published on 4 October 2020, five weeks before Pfizer communicated, "Pfizer and BioNTech Announce Vaccine Candidate Against COVID-19 Achieved Success in First Interim Analysis from Phase 3 Study" (9 November 2020). In early October, did experts, public health officials, policy-makers, media, or the median voter have good reason or evidence to forecast that vaccines would soon be widely available? Show your homework.
3) Yglesias retrospectively asserts that continuance of restrictions/closures through Fall 2020 and Winter 2021 would have had pretty low costs. This, too, is questionable. See the articles, listed below, which identify major costs in most restrictions/closures before the advent of vaccines. Two of the articles were written at approximately the same time as the Great Barrington Declaration, and thus reflect the state of knowledge at the time, about costs of restrictions/closures.
-- Tomas J. Philipson (U. of Chicago; former Acting Chair of the CEA), "An Economic Evaluation of Covid Lockdowns: The costs of prevention efforts have outweighed those from the direct effects of the virus itself" WSJ (19 January 2022):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-economic-evaluation-of-covid-lockdowns-pandemic-deaths-spread-biden-trump-vaccine-mandate-11642627730
-- Phillip Magness (AIER), "The Failures of Pandemic Central Planning," SSRN (1 October 2020):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934452
-- Eric Budish (U. of Chicago), "Maximize Utility subject to R ≤ 1: A Simple Price-Theory Approach to Covid-19 Lockdown and Reopening Policy," NBER (April 2020, revised November 2020):
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28093/w28093.pdf