When officials misbehave, we naturally wonder: How much is due to incompetence? And how much to malice? In Arnold's terms, we may wonder: How much is due to the knowledge problem? And how much to selection and corruption?
In the case of the pandemic, I would lean more than Arnold to selection and corruption.
For example, Arnold writes: "Consider policy during the pandemic. In principle, regulators should have carefully calculated the trade-offs involved in closing schools and restricting people’s activities. In practice, they lacked the means to do so."
School closures persisted *much* longer than any knowledge problem might have initially fueled. Compare Casey Mulligan's study, "The incidence and magnitude of the health costs of in‑person
schooling during the COVID‑19 pandemic," _Public Choice_ (2021). Here is an un-gated link:
(Mulligan's working paper was circulated in winter 2021. The final MS is dated 21 May 2021.)
Mulligan writes:
"Abstract
The health costs of in-person schooling during the pandemic, if any, fall primarily on the families of students, largely owing to the fact that students significantly outnumber teachers. Data from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Australia, England, and Israel covering almost 80 million person-days in school during 2020 help assess the magnitude of the fatality risks of in-person schooling, accounting for mitigation protocols as well as the age and living arrangements of students and teachers. The risks of in-person schooling to unvaccinated teachers are, for those not yet elderly, small enough to challenge comprehension. Valued at a VSL of $10 million, the average daily fatality cost ranges from $0.01 for a young teacher living alone to as much as $29 for an elderly teacher living with an elderly spouse. For each 22 million unvaccinated students and teachers schooling in-person for a 5-day week during the pandemic, the expected number of fatalities among teachers and their spouses is one or less."
The upshot: Officials and regulators who closed schools could and should have known better. Many (most?) probably did know better. Corruption and pandering to squeaky wheels.
The fundamental problem with school closures is there was no market. If the Teachers Union refused to provide their product (in-person schooling) they got paid anyway. Private schools that refused to provide their product didn't get paid, so they found a way.
Yes and no. Private schools did open, but in many States (w/ political agenda) the private schools imposed harmful restrictions on youths in school and on campus. The restrictions weren't based on any knowledge problem. I can report from the trenches that the enforced isolation was draconian and even absurd.
Many “liberal” private schools did what liberals wanted to do.
But your average private school is some Christian school run on a shoe string budget. Ours defied the governors orders even under threat of consequences (which never came in the end).
Trump was president - seems to me like they deliberately wanted to kill the economy and make things as difficult for people as possible….while making it easier for the government employees that vote for the lockdown advocates. A win-win
This overplays the role of teachers' unions. A lot of PARENTS -- including parents of minority children who suffered the most from closures -- were (mistakenly) fearful of in person classes.
The Mulligan article is another example of the knowledge problem, along with the problem of defining a problem too narrowly. The Mulligan article seems to implicitly assume that the only problem which school closures were supposed to deal with were teachers getting sick and dying.
My wife has a number of elderly friends who might be considered "frail". She was deathly afraid that COVID viruses would spread the through schools (without doing much to the students since the virus mostly targeted old people) and then be brought to vulnerable old people when the asymptomatic young visit, leading to deaths. She may have been unnecessarily worried, but at the time, no one knew how much of a possibility that was. I'm not sure anyone does even now. Mulligan's study would do nothing to allay her fears and certainly does not merit the conclusion, "Officials and regulators who closed schools could and should have known better."
It might have been true in march 2020, but it was largely know to be false by sept 2020. And of course in democratic states it was even more known in sept 2021 when they continued the covid nonsense another year even with vaccines.
Good advice. Of course, one of the great unknowns was whether non-symptomatic people were contagious. As I recall, Arnold was appalled at how the medical establishment didn't seem to be in any hurry to find out. In the spirit of the Precautionary Principle, many people assumed that anyone could be contagious and, thus, the proper strategy was to isolate as much as possible.
If they knew better it was no thanks to CDC which did not not provide them with the data and methodology to come up with the optimum policies (and arguments to silence the "squeaky wheels)
[I note that the paper cited came AFTER the summer 2020 discussions about the costs and benefits of closing schools.] So the CEA did not help, either.
There are some other interesting issues with regulation in that there are many of them go "dormant" when the regulator decides that there is no longer support for enforcing the rules as written. There comes to be a tacit understanding that the regulations on the books, duly authorized by Congress, cause more problems than they solve. Then the question is by whose rules the industry now operates under, and the typical answer is just the regulated industry becomes the government for that particular slice of the economy. As such, the Article I government delegated regulation of a certain matter to the Article II government, which in turn delegated the regulation to a cartel of corporations.
If you get in the weeds within any regulated industry, you will come to recognize this pattern.
Sometimes this is confused with "deregulation" by wags, but it isn't. There is typically a skeletal structure of actually-enforced regulations, but then the particulars are left on the books but dormant. In certain areas this can lead to unpredictability because it is much easier constitutionally for the Article II government to just elect not to enforce the law (see immigration) than it is for the Article II government to enforce the law in a manner that gives rise to controversy and litigation.
There are some laws against selective prosecution, but it is very difficult to make the cases for various reasons (showing it was for an improper purpose requires a very strong showing).
There is another problem with technocracy, a problem that Arnold, Robin Hanson, and others identified in real time during the pandemic. Technocracy has tied its own hands (over-regulated itself) by imposing undue restrictions on voluntary research on human subjects.
Well into the pandemic, people were quarantining their delivery packages because "the science" had not done proper experiments to determine the modalities of transmission (fomite, aerosol, etc.).
There is too much that we do not know about COVID-19. The longer we take to find it out, the more lives will be lost. In this paper, we will defend a principle of risk parity: if it is permissible to expose some members of society (e.g. health workers or the economically vulnerable) to a certain level of ex ante risk in order to minimize overall harm from the virus, then it is permissible to expose fully informed volunteers to a comparable level of risk in the context of promising research into the virus. We apply this principle to three examples of risky research: skipping animal trials for promising treatments, human challenge trials to speed up vaccine development, and low-dose controlled infection or 'variolation.”'We conclude that if volunteers, fully informed about the risks, are willing to help fight the pandemic by aiding promising research, there are strong moral reasons to gratefully accept their help. To refuse it would implicitly subject others to still graver risks."
An irony is that technocrats have no issue with market entertainments that involve observing (and studying) humans take voluntary risks in controlled settings that necessarily involve risk of injury or occasionally death; for example, U.S. football, Formula 1 car racing, downhill skiing, etc.
There is an interesting experiment underway that speaks to this issue I think: are expert forecasts of the election outcome (based on statistical models such as those published by FiveThirtyEight, the Economist, Silver Bulletin) more accurate than prediction markets (PredictIt, Polymarket, IEM). I am evaluating precisely this and have done so in earlier work.
I think the answer is likely to be domain specific. For elections, predictions markets may well be better. For hurricanes passing through population centers I would bet on experts.
More generally, it would be good to have an empirical program that tests these claims. And my intuition tells me that competition among experts and freedom of expression will be critically important variables to consider.
Your examples illustrate exactly the point I made in a different comment. Markets aren't always better. Deciding when they are or aren't is difficult but necessary.
A dispositive comparison would require thick markets.
With respect to a comparison of fledgling markets and expert models, your essay indicates much less disagreement between markets than among expert models:
"While arbitrage places limits on the extent to which markets can disagree, there is no such constraint on statistical models. Here the disagreement is substantially greater—the probability of a Trump victory ranges from 45 percent on FiveThirtyEight to 49 percent on the Economist and 62 percent on Silver Bulletin."
In evaluating prediction markets you do need to look at the depth of the market- in other words what movement is caused by what level of bet. All markets are open to manipulation and shallow ones are the most open of all.
Arnold wrote: "Technocratic regulation is not as good in practice as it sounds in theory. Conservatives and libertarians recognize this. Progressives rarely do." A possible reason: Unlike Conservatism and Libertarianism, Progressivism's focus on meliorism (including in the form of technocratic regulation) provides moral cover for social predation, i.e., grift. And it is human nature to sincerely believe in what is one's interest, even if it is necessary to ignore counter evidence.
Agreed - rent-seeking is a technical economic term which means little to most readers, and corruption refers broadly to illegal, bad, or dishonest behavior. Neither term refers to motivation, so I prefer the term grift, which conveys that such behavior is motivated by the pursuit of money or power.
But aren't you just describing a human society? Wherever you have groups of people collaborating together to make decisions, you will have corrupt, power hungry people trying to exploit the group for their own benefit, all decision makers will have imperfect knowledge when making a decision, and there are always tradeoffs.
Both governments and markets have these problems. Assume for sake for argument that markets are generally better for making decisions, why don't we defund the police and let people purchase the services of private security firms? Why not get rid of all copy right and patent laws? How about we end all environmental laws and when there's dispute between parties over pollution externalities, groups can have their private armies go and kill each other? Taken to its logical conclusion combined with a profound distrust of technocrats, it seems like this is an argument for some form of anarcho-capitalism combined with some form of populist decision making and rich oligarchs.
In my experience, loathing of technocracy in practice quickly morphs into a loathing of expertise and the belief that one doesn't need to learn or understand anything in order to make decisions. See national conservatives love of tarrifs. I don't think logically one follows the other but it sure seems like that's how people land. And to be clear this is a bipartisan criticism. There's sadly probably a lot to be said for the Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen argument that most debates are debates among elites over status.
Another issue with bureaucratic expert control is their skewed incentives, they have little upside should they approve risky actions and a great deal of downside should subsequent events show the decision was in error. So they tend to err on the safe side, we see this with drug regulation, spaceX issues, and willingness to try new technologies in Government. Market based organizations have much more upside if things go well to balance out downside risks.
"Progressives like the notion of public policy being formulated and carried out by experts."
Maybe. _Liberals_ think of policy being made democratically (the parameters of an operational utility function being set) and then experts executing the results of the application that function to specific cases. Congress sets the value of a snail darter life and EPA comes up with the optimum regulation trading off snail darters lives with economic growth. Of course tis has the weakness of agency problem. EPA can make regulations that aggrandize EPA "interests."
Sorry, but I'm going to have to push back on this 'both sides did it' comparison of what 'conservatives' (McCarthyites) did to American communists and fellow travelers (who called themselves progressives) in the 1950s and the cancellation of conservatives by woke progressive ideologues today (and no, I'm not going to dignify what N.S. Lyons and Auron MacIntyre label the 'professional managerial class' by calling them technocrats and experts given their destructive influence on society). The close ties between the Soviet/Stalinist Communist Party and American Communists/progressives/fellow travelers in the 1940s and 1950s have been well documented in the works of Haynes and Klehr, Radosh, and David Horowitz's autobiography Radical Son. Not all of McCarthy's victims were innocent. It is not American conservatives who have successfully infiltrated the universities, the federal government bureaucracy, HR departments and the 'philanthropic-NGO-industrial complex,' and when you watch today's progressive activists systematically destroying the country's institutions and culture with the insidious influence of DEI, gender ideology, 'climate change' and Orwellian 'clean energy,' among other things, it is hard not to wonder where we would be had not buffoons like McCarthy stood up against the American Communist Party. You don't have to approve of the tactics of someone like McCarthy to ask the question of what people in free societies who just 'want to be left alone' are supposed to do in the face of the persistent activism by tyrannically minded progressive ideologues. And although I don't recall the details, I say this knowing that members of AK's own family were the targets of the McCarthyism movement, as was David Horowitz's father. As with many if not most Ashkenazi Jews, my family closet includes some Communist or Communist-sympathizing skeletons, and although I understand how the hardships they endured may have shaped these beliefs, I still think the participation of American Jews in the Communist Party, as well as the progressive movement today, should be denounced.
Students, now that we’re done reading Arnold’s essay let’s discuss the difference between socialism and technocracy? In formulating your answers consider these passages from the Wikipedia entry of technocracy. Who wants to go first?
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.
The term technocracy was initially used to signify the application of the scientific method to solving social problems. In its most extreme form, technocracy is an entire government running as a technical or engineering problem and is mostly hypothetical. In more practical use, technocracy is any portion of a bureaucracy run by technologists. A government in which elected officials appoint experts and professionals to administer individual government functions, and recommend legislation, can be considered technocratic. Some uses of the word refer to a form of meritocracy, where the ablest are in charge, ostensibly without the influence of special interest groups.
The term technocracy is derived from the Greek words τέχνη, tekhne meaning skill and κράτος, kratos meaning power, as in governance, or rule. William Henry Smyth, a California engineer, is usually credited with inventing the word technocracy in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers", although the word had been used before on several occasions. Smyth used the term Technocracy in his 1919 article "'Technocracy'—Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy" in the journal Industrial Management. Smyth's usage referred to Industrial democracy: a movement to integrate workers into decision-making through existing firms or revolution.
Technocrats are individuals with technical training and occupations who perceive many important societal problems as being solvable with the applied use of technology and related applications.
Before the term technocracy was coined, technocratic or quasi-technocratic ideas involving governance by technical experts were promoted by various individuals, most notably early socialist theorists such as Henri de Saint-Simon. This was expressed by the belief in state ownership over the economy, with the state's function being transformed from pure philosophical rule over men into a scientific administration of things and a direction of production processes under scientific management.
Have you read Bureaucracy by James Q Wilson? I think it's a book you would appreciate. It was written in the 80s so I suspect many of the details are out of date, but I think the general lessons it contains are timeless. It tries to describe why government agencies behave the way they do, from the ground up, starting with the bottom level operators and the culture and circumstances they live in. It's not easy to summarize; it makes a lot of different points. But for example, he distinguishes goals, general often vague descriptions of what an agency is supposed to bring about, from tasks, something an agency can actually do, and turning goals into tasks shapes a lot of how an agency works. OSHA was created with the dual goals of increasing worker safety and worker health. But turning health (someone getting cancer 15 years after working there, eg) into an operable task was difficult, while safety (someone falling off a ladder) was a more operable task and came to dominate what OSHA actually does.
Another example. He also has a helpful quadrant: agencies can have effects that are easy/hard to observe and operators whose actions are easy/hard to observe. Eg he distinguishes the army in peace time, when it's easy to keep track of the soldiers but hard to know how war-ready they are, vs the army in war-time when it can be chaotic to keep track of what small units are doing but you know if you win or lose a battle.
I did read it. What stuck with me most was his analysis of the French and German armies in World War II, with the German low-level officers having much more initiative. Ironic given that Germany was a dictatorship and France a democracy, but consistent with decades of German military doctrine.
I think conservatives and libertarians don't offer any useful alternative. How can the market give me advice whether I should be vaccinated or not? All I know is they are largely the result of market processes, but of course government subsidies played a role. So it is not even so that the market process and the government is diametrically opposed on that. Usually experts of both sectors say the same things.
COVID lockdown questions were the MOTHER of all externality problems and those are famously hard, first because there ARE transactions costs and second because Coase guarantees only an efficient solution - and not a fair one.
Conservatives are engaging in plenty of muffling of free speech themselves. Think about even the most reasonable criticism of Israel, escalation in relations to Iran and increasingly also China, and Trump in the likes of Fox News (which, despite having a huge audience, disingenuously claim that they are not part of the mainstream media). And what better an example of cancel culture going to far than ostracizing people with impeccable conservative credentials like Liz Cheney? There is even much ambivalence left around the results of the last election, and people who still claim it was stolen are perhaps not endorsed but allowed to speak more or less uncontested.
This is sometimes worse than the status of free speech in Russia, which I happen to know a bit more about. Although, unfortunately, the criticism of Putin is mostly well to his much more hawkish right - I have still to hear someone say that, to the contrary, we should welcome Nato absorbing Ukraine and Nato troops along the same border over which Russia has been invaded every 30 - 50 years throughout its history. But there is surely much more open criticism of Putin within the right (let us say for simplicity that Putin is on the right) than I see about Trump, even in state media.
Conservatives are engaging in plenty of muffling of free speech themselves. Think about even the most reasonable criticism of Israel, escalation in relations to Iran and increasingly also China, and Trump in the likes of Fox News (which, despite having a huge audience, disingenuously claim that they are not part of the mainstream media). And what better an example of cancel culture going to far than ostracizing people with impeccable conservative credentials like Liz Cheney? There is even much ambivalence left around the results of the last election, and people who still claim it was stolen are perhaps not endorsed but allowed to speak more or less uncontested.
This is sometimes worse than the status of free speech in Russia, which I happen to know a bit more about. Although, unfortunately, the criticism of Putin is mostly well to his much more hawkish right - I have still to hear someone say that, to the contrary, we should welcome Nato absorbing Ukraine and Nato troops along the same border over which Russia has been invaded every 30 - 50 years throughout its history. But there is surely much more open criticism of Putin within the right (let us say for simplicity that Putin is on the right) than I see about Trump, even in state media.
"An official who is low on honesty/humility will do whatever it takes to get ahead. He will undermine potential rivals. He will flatter and deceive his bosses. Once in a high position, he will be very concerned with preserving his personal reputation and power. He will think of himself as entitled to make rules for others, without necessarily following those rules himself. He will deceive the public “for their own good.” "
When I first read this it didn't sit well and I wasn't sure why. Later I realized I knew 3 or 4 SES, a one-star who later made it to three star, and many others a level or two lower who all weren't like this. In my career I can only think of one who fit this description. As a new and new to me SES he was obviously more concerned about his advancement than his organization and lasted less than two years before he was moved to where he could do no more damage. I'm not saying everyone in positions of authority was good, just that in my anecdotal experience, successful people did not fit your description.
What I saw in the people who advanced was mostly competence in their current job even if it wasn't clear they were a good fit for the next. The ones who quickly progressed many levels were a combination of competent, motivated, and charismatic. If it became evident someone was any part of what you describe (with the likely exception of flattering their bosses), they might maintain their current position but they progressed no further.
Once again, I have to complain that lots of people reading this will not know that SES means Senior Executive Service, a track for high level bosses in the federal civil service.
Acronyms are useful then they convey information in less time (or fewer keystrokes). They are harmful when they don't convey information beyond the letters.
2) Yes, it does suggest that, but why require a person to figure it out from context?
1) You are writing it. Why should a reader have to Google to find out what you mean?
Maybe I'm too much of a marshmallow, but it just seems like a nice thing to do to make it easy on the reader. And it may make the reader more likely to consider favorably what you are saying.
Sharp post.
When officials misbehave, we naturally wonder: How much is due to incompetence? And how much to malice? In Arnold's terms, we may wonder: How much is due to the knowledge problem? And how much to selection and corruption?
In the case of the pandemic, I would lean more than Arnold to selection and corruption.
For example, Arnold writes: "Consider policy during the pandemic. In principle, regulators should have carefully calculated the trade-offs involved in closing schools and restricting people’s activities. In practice, they lacked the means to do so."
School closures persisted *much* longer than any knowledge problem might have initially fueled. Compare Casey Mulligan's study, "The incidence and magnitude of the health costs of in‑person
schooling during the COVID‑19 pandemic," _Public Choice_ (2021). Here is an un-gated link:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-021-00917-7
(Mulligan's working paper was circulated in winter 2021. The final MS is dated 21 May 2021.)
Mulligan writes:
"Abstract
The health costs of in-person schooling during the pandemic, if any, fall primarily on the families of students, largely owing to the fact that students significantly outnumber teachers. Data from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Australia, England, and Israel covering almost 80 million person-days in school during 2020 help assess the magnitude of the fatality risks of in-person schooling, accounting for mitigation protocols as well as the age and living arrangements of students and teachers. The risks of in-person schooling to unvaccinated teachers are, for those not yet elderly, small enough to challenge comprehension. Valued at a VSL of $10 million, the average daily fatality cost ranges from $0.01 for a young teacher living alone to as much as $29 for an elderly teacher living with an elderly spouse. For each 22 million unvaccinated students and teachers schooling in-person for a 5-day week during the pandemic, the expected number of fatalities among teachers and their spouses is one or less."
The upshot: Officials and regulators who closed schools could and should have known better. Many (most?) probably did know better. Corruption and pandering to squeaky wheels.
The fundamental problem with school closures is there was no market. If the Teachers Union refused to provide their product (in-person schooling) they got paid anyway. Private schools that refused to provide their product didn't get paid, so they found a way.
Yes and no. Private schools did open, but in many States (w/ political agenda) the private schools imposed harmful restrictions on youths in school and on campus. The restrictions weren't based on any knowledge problem. I can report from the trenches that the enforced isolation was draconian and even absurd.
Many “liberal” private schools did what liberals wanted to do.
But your average private school is some Christian school run on a shoe string budget. Ours defied the governors orders even under threat of consequences (which never came in the end).
Fair enough!
Trump was president - seems to me like they deliberately wanted to kill the economy and make things as difficult for people as possible….while making it easier for the government employees that vote for the lockdown advocates. A win-win
This overplays the role of teachers' unions. A lot of PARENTS -- including parents of minority children who suffered the most from closures -- were (mistakenly) fearful of in person classes.
The Mulligan article is another example of the knowledge problem, along with the problem of defining a problem too narrowly. The Mulligan article seems to implicitly assume that the only problem which school closures were supposed to deal with were teachers getting sick and dying.
My wife has a number of elderly friends who might be considered "frail". She was deathly afraid that COVID viruses would spread the through schools (without doing much to the students since the virus mostly targeted old people) and then be brought to vulnerable old people when the asymptomatic young visit, leading to deaths. She may have been unnecessarily worried, but at the time, no one knew how much of a possibility that was. I'm not sure anyone does even now. Mulligan's study would do nothing to allay her fears and certainly does not merit the conclusion, "Officials and regulators who closed schools could and should have known better."
“No one knew” is false.
It might have been true in march 2020, but it was largely know to be false by sept 2020. And of course in democratic states it was even more known in sept 2021 when they continued the covid nonsense another year even with vaccines.
Agreed Sept 2021. In hindsight it might be true Sept 2020 but the key word there is hindsight.
Note: I flew for vacation Sept 2020. I think the risk made sense. Not as clear for society more broadly.
Don’t accept visits from young people….or anyone with symptoms
Good advice. Of course, one of the great unknowns was whether non-symptomatic people were contagious. As I recall, Arnold was appalled at how the medical establishment didn't seem to be in any hurry to find out. In the spirit of the Precautionary Principle, many people assumed that anyone could be contagious and, thus, the proper strategy was to isolate as much as possible.
If they knew better it was no thanks to CDC which did not not provide them with the data and methodology to come up with the optimum policies (and arguments to silence the "squeaky wheels)
[I note that the paper cited came AFTER the summer 2020 discussions about the costs and benefits of closing schools.] So the CEA did not help, either.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors
There are some other interesting issues with regulation in that there are many of them go "dormant" when the regulator decides that there is no longer support for enforcing the rules as written. There comes to be a tacit understanding that the regulations on the books, duly authorized by Congress, cause more problems than they solve. Then the question is by whose rules the industry now operates under, and the typical answer is just the regulated industry becomes the government for that particular slice of the economy. As such, the Article I government delegated regulation of a certain matter to the Article II government, which in turn delegated the regulation to a cartel of corporations.
If you get in the weeds within any regulated industry, you will come to recognize this pattern.
Sometimes this is confused with "deregulation" by wags, but it isn't. There is typically a skeletal structure of actually-enforced regulations, but then the particulars are left on the books but dormant. In certain areas this can lead to unpredictability because it is much easier constitutionally for the Article II government to just elect not to enforce the law (see immigration) than it is for the Article II government to enforce the law in a manner that gives rise to controversy and litigation.
and the regulators remain free to selectively enforce against disfavored companies, e.g., money services businesses, as the political winds blow
There are some laws against selective prosecution, but it is very difficult to make the cases for various reasons (showing it was for an improper purpose requires a very strong showing).
Indeed
There is another problem with technocracy, a problem that Arnold, Robin Hanson, and others identified in real time during the pandemic. Technocracy has tied its own hands (over-regulated itself) by imposing undue restrictions on voluntary research on human subjects.
Well into the pandemic, people were quarantining their delivery packages because "the science" had not done proper experiments to determine the modalities of transmission (fomite, aerosol, etc.).
See:
• Arnold Kling (20 march 2020), "The experiment":
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-experiment/
• Robin Hanson, "Reply to Cowen on variolation":
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/reply-to-cowen-on-variolationhtml
• Richard Yetter Chappell & Peter Singer, "The Case for Risky Research," Research Ethics (2020):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341843678_Pandemic_ethics_the_case_for_risky_research
"Abstract
There is too much that we do not know about COVID-19. The longer we take to find it out, the more lives will be lost. In this paper, we will defend a principle of risk parity: if it is permissible to expose some members of society (e.g. health workers or the economically vulnerable) to a certain level of ex ante risk in order to minimize overall harm from the virus, then it is permissible to expose fully informed volunteers to a comparable level of risk in the context of promising research into the virus. We apply this principle to three examples of risky research: skipping animal trials for promising treatments, human challenge trials to speed up vaccine development, and low-dose controlled infection or 'variolation.”'We conclude that if volunteers, fully informed about the risks, are willing to help fight the pandemic by aiding promising research, there are strong moral reasons to gratefully accept their help. To refuse it would implicitly subject others to still graver risks."
An irony is that technocrats have no issue with market entertainments that involve observing (and studying) humans take voluntary risks in controlled settings that necessarily involve risk of injury or occasionally death; for example, U.S. football, Formula 1 car racing, downhill skiing, etc.
There is an interesting experiment underway that speaks to this issue I think: are expert forecasts of the election outcome (based on statistical models such as those published by FiveThirtyEight, the Economist, Silver Bulletin) more accurate than prediction markets (PredictIt, Polymarket, IEM). I am evaluating precisely this and have done so in earlier work.
I think the answer is likely to be domain specific. For elections, predictions markets may well be better. For hurricanes passing through population centers I would bet on experts.
More generally, it would be good to have an empirical program that tests these claims. And my intuition tells me that competition among experts and freedom of expression will be critically important variables to consider.
A recent post that may be of interest:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rajivsethi/p/on-models-markets-and-disagreement
Your examples illustrate exactly the point I made in a different comment. Markets aren't always better. Deciding when they are or aren't is difficult but necessary.
Markets (bettors) take into account what experts predict!
Ok, so what do bettors add to hurricane prediction?
Let's say we want to know where landfall will be. Do we gain something from betting whether it is left or right of the prediction?
Yes, and experts can add market prices to models. Still they often disagree quite substantially, so the question of relative accuracy arises.
A dispositive comparison would require thick markets.
With respect to a comparison of fledgling markets and expert models, your essay indicates much less disagreement between markets than among expert models:
"While arbitrage places limits on the extent to which markets can disagree, there is no such constraint on statistical models. Here the disagreement is substantially greater—the probability of a Trump victory ranges from 45 percent on FiveThirtyEight to 49 percent on the Economist and 62 percent on Silver Bulletin."
Which expert model should a layperson believe?
In evaluating prediction markets you do need to look at the depth of the market- in other words what movement is caused by what level of bet. All markets are open to manipulation and shallow ones are the most open of all.
Arnold wrote: "Technocratic regulation is not as good in practice as it sounds in theory. Conservatives and libertarians recognize this. Progressives rarely do." A possible reason: Unlike Conservatism and Libertarianism, Progressivism's focus on meliorism (including in the form of technocratic regulation) provides moral cover for social predation, i.e., grift. And it is human nature to sincerely believe in what is one's interest, even if it is necessary to ignore counter evidence.
It would be good to speak of grift and grift-seeking, rather than corruption & rent-seeking.
Agreed - rent-seeking is a technical economic term which means little to most readers, and corruption refers broadly to illegal, bad, or dishonest behavior. Neither term refers to motivation, so I prefer the term grift, which conveys that such behavior is motivated by the pursuit of money or power.
But aren't you just describing a human society? Wherever you have groups of people collaborating together to make decisions, you will have corrupt, power hungry people trying to exploit the group for their own benefit, all decision makers will have imperfect knowledge when making a decision, and there are always tradeoffs.
Both governments and markets have these problems. Assume for sake for argument that markets are generally better for making decisions, why don't we defund the police and let people purchase the services of private security firms? Why not get rid of all copy right and patent laws? How about we end all environmental laws and when there's dispute between parties over pollution externalities, groups can have their private armies go and kill each other? Taken to its logical conclusion combined with a profound distrust of technocrats, it seems like this is an argument for some form of anarcho-capitalism combined with some form of populist decision making and rich oligarchs.
In my experience, loathing of technocracy in practice quickly morphs into a loathing of expertise and the belief that one doesn't need to learn or understand anything in order to make decisions. See national conservatives love of tarrifs. I don't think logically one follows the other but it sure seems like that's how people land. And to be clear this is a bipartisan criticism. There's sadly probably a lot to be said for the Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen argument that most debates are debates among elites over status.
Related: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for
Another issue with bureaucratic expert control is their skewed incentives, they have little upside should they approve risky actions and a great deal of downside should subsequent events show the decision was in error. So they tend to err on the safe side, we see this with drug regulation, spaceX issues, and willingness to try new technologies in Government. Market based organizations have much more upside if things go well to balance out downside risks.
"Progressives like the notion of public policy being formulated and carried out by experts."
Maybe. _Liberals_ think of policy being made democratically (the parameters of an operational utility function being set) and then experts executing the results of the application that function to specific cases. Congress sets the value of a snail darter life and EPA comes up with the optimum regulation trading off snail darters lives with economic growth. Of course tis has the weakness of agency problem. EPA can make regulations that aggrandize EPA "interests."
Sorry, but I'm going to have to push back on this 'both sides did it' comparison of what 'conservatives' (McCarthyites) did to American communists and fellow travelers (who called themselves progressives) in the 1950s and the cancellation of conservatives by woke progressive ideologues today (and no, I'm not going to dignify what N.S. Lyons and Auron MacIntyre label the 'professional managerial class' by calling them technocrats and experts given their destructive influence on society). The close ties between the Soviet/Stalinist Communist Party and American Communists/progressives/fellow travelers in the 1940s and 1950s have been well documented in the works of Haynes and Klehr, Radosh, and David Horowitz's autobiography Radical Son. Not all of McCarthy's victims were innocent. It is not American conservatives who have successfully infiltrated the universities, the federal government bureaucracy, HR departments and the 'philanthropic-NGO-industrial complex,' and when you watch today's progressive activists systematically destroying the country's institutions and culture with the insidious influence of DEI, gender ideology, 'climate change' and Orwellian 'clean energy,' among other things, it is hard not to wonder where we would be had not buffoons like McCarthy stood up against the American Communist Party. You don't have to approve of the tactics of someone like McCarthy to ask the question of what people in free societies who just 'want to be left alone' are supposed to do in the face of the persistent activism by tyrannically minded progressive ideologues. And although I don't recall the details, I say this knowing that members of AK's own family were the targets of the McCarthyism movement, as was David Horowitz's father. As with many if not most Ashkenazi Jews, my family closet includes some Communist or Communist-sympathizing skeletons, and although I understand how the hardships they endured may have shaped these beliefs, I still think the participation of American Jews in the Communist Party, as well as the progressive movement today, should be denounced.
Students, now that we’re done reading Arnold’s essay let’s discuss the difference between socialism and technocracy? In formulating your answers consider these passages from the Wikipedia entry of technocracy. Who wants to go first?
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.
The term technocracy was initially used to signify the application of the scientific method to solving social problems. In its most extreme form, technocracy is an entire government running as a technical or engineering problem and is mostly hypothetical. In more practical use, technocracy is any portion of a bureaucracy run by technologists. A government in which elected officials appoint experts and professionals to administer individual government functions, and recommend legislation, can be considered technocratic. Some uses of the word refer to a form of meritocracy, where the ablest are in charge, ostensibly without the influence of special interest groups.
The term technocracy is derived from the Greek words τέχνη, tekhne meaning skill and κράτος, kratos meaning power, as in governance, or rule. William Henry Smyth, a California engineer, is usually credited with inventing the word technocracy in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers", although the word had been used before on several occasions. Smyth used the term Technocracy in his 1919 article "'Technocracy'—Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy" in the journal Industrial Management. Smyth's usage referred to Industrial democracy: a movement to integrate workers into decision-making through existing firms or revolution.
Technocrats are individuals with technical training and occupations who perceive many important societal problems as being solvable with the applied use of technology and related applications.
Before the term technocracy was coined, technocratic or quasi-technocratic ideas involving governance by technical experts were promoted by various individuals, most notably early socialist theorists such as Henri de Saint-Simon. This was expressed by the belief in state ownership over the economy, with the state's function being transformed from pure philosophical rule over men into a scientific administration of things and a direction of production processes under scientific management.
I agree, and I give two possible mitigants: move from mere credentialism to (credentialism + forecasting):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4746860
and use sortision for the leading positions;
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
Have you read Bureaucracy by James Q Wilson? I think it's a book you would appreciate. It was written in the 80s so I suspect many of the details are out of date, but I think the general lessons it contains are timeless. It tries to describe why government agencies behave the way they do, from the ground up, starting with the bottom level operators and the culture and circumstances they live in. It's not easy to summarize; it makes a lot of different points. But for example, he distinguishes goals, general often vague descriptions of what an agency is supposed to bring about, from tasks, something an agency can actually do, and turning goals into tasks shapes a lot of how an agency works. OSHA was created with the dual goals of increasing worker safety and worker health. But turning health (someone getting cancer 15 years after working there, eg) into an operable task was difficult, while safety (someone falling off a ladder) was a more operable task and came to dominate what OSHA actually does.
Another example. He also has a helpful quadrant: agencies can have effects that are easy/hard to observe and operators whose actions are easy/hard to observe. Eg he distinguishes the army in peace time, when it's easy to keep track of the soldiers but hard to know how war-ready they are, vs the army in war-time when it can be chaotic to keep track of what small units are doing but you know if you win or lose a battle.
I did read it. What stuck with me most was his analysis of the French and German armies in World War II, with the German low-level officers having much more initiative. Ironic given that Germany was a dictatorship and France a democracy, but consistent with decades of German military doctrine.
I think conservatives and libertarians don't offer any useful alternative. How can the market give me advice whether I should be vaccinated or not? All I know is they are largely the result of market processes, but of course government subsidies played a role. So it is not even so that the market process and the government is diametrically opposed on that. Usually experts of both sectors say the same things.
COVID lockdown questions were the MOTHER of all externality problems and those are famously hard, first because there ARE transactions costs and second because Coase guarantees only an efficient solution - and not a fair one.
Conservatives are engaging in plenty of muffling of free speech themselves. Think about even the most reasonable criticism of Israel, escalation in relations to Iran and increasingly also China, and Trump in the likes of Fox News (which, despite having a huge audience, disingenuously claim that they are not part of the mainstream media). And what better an example of cancel culture going to far than ostracizing people with impeccable conservative credentials like Liz Cheney? There is even much ambivalence left around the results of the last election, and people who still claim it was stolen are perhaps not endorsed but allowed to speak more or less uncontested.
This is sometimes worse than the status of free speech in Russia, which I happen to know a bit more about. Although, unfortunately, the criticism of Putin is mostly well to his much more hawkish right - I have still to hear someone say that, to the contrary, we should welcome Nato absorbing Ukraine and Nato troops along the same border over which Russia has been invaded every 30 - 50 years throughout its history. But there is surely much more open criticism of Putin within the right (let us say for simplicity that Putin is on the right) than I see about Trump, even in state media.
That should tell us something...
Conservatives are engaging in plenty of muffling of free speech themselves. Think about even the most reasonable criticism of Israel, escalation in relations to Iran and increasingly also China, and Trump in the likes of Fox News (which, despite having a huge audience, disingenuously claim that they are not part of the mainstream media). And what better an example of cancel culture going to far than ostracizing people with impeccable conservative credentials like Liz Cheney? There is even much ambivalence left around the results of the last election, and people who still claim it was stolen are perhaps not endorsed but allowed to speak more or less uncontested.
This is sometimes worse than the status of free speech in Russia, which I happen to know a bit more about. Although, unfortunately, the criticism of Putin is mostly well to his much more hawkish right - I have still to hear someone say that, to the contrary, we should welcome Nato absorbing Ukraine and Nato troops along the same border over which Russia has been invaded every 30 - 50 years throughout its history. But there is surely much more open criticism of Putin within the right (let us say for simplicity that Putin is on the right) than I see about Trump, even in state media.
That should tell us something...
"An official who is low on honesty/humility will do whatever it takes to get ahead. He will undermine potential rivals. He will flatter and deceive his bosses. Once in a high position, he will be very concerned with preserving his personal reputation and power. He will think of himself as entitled to make rules for others, without necessarily following those rules himself. He will deceive the public “for their own good.” "
When I first read this it didn't sit well and I wasn't sure why. Later I realized I knew 3 or 4 SES, a one-star who later made it to three star, and many others a level or two lower who all weren't like this. In my career I can only think of one who fit this description. As a new and new to me SES he was obviously more concerned about his advancement than his organization and lasted less than two years before he was moved to where he could do no more damage. I'm not saying everyone in positions of authority was good, just that in my anecdotal experience, successful people did not fit your description.
What I saw in the people who advanced was mostly competence in their current job even if it wasn't clear they were a good fit for the next. The ones who quickly progressed many levels were a combination of competent, motivated, and charismatic. If it became evident someone was any part of what you describe (with the likely exception of flattering their bosses), they might maintain their current position but they progressed no further.
Once again, I have to complain that lots of people reading this will not know that SES means Senior Executive Service, a track for high level bosses in the federal civil service.
Acronyms are useful then they convey information in less time (or fewer keystrokes). They are harmful when they don't convey information beyond the letters.
I thought about writing it out and decided against it.
1 if one is reading this on a phone or computer it is easy to Google it.
2 more importantly, context tells one it refers to someone above the first couple management levels.
3 finally, if some doesn't know SES, writing out "Senior Executive Service" isn't going to be any more informative.
3) I think it is a little more informative.
2) Yes, it does suggest that, but why require a person to figure it out from context?
1) You are writing it. Why should a reader have to Google to find out what you mean?
Maybe I'm too much of a marshmallow, but it just seems like a nice thing to do to make it easy on the reader. And it may make the reader more likely to consider favorably what you are saying.