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.
Conspiracy thinking tends to be entirely ignorant of Hyek’s tacit knowledge observation. Kling’s comments regarding the technocratic failings of Covid policy is just one example of a real world consequence of humans just not being as organized and intelligent as conspiracy theorists might want to believe. Coincidently (perhaps ironically), recognizing that even the “smartest people” have such little control over world events must be a very frightening reality for these thinkers.
Has there ever been an empirical study of whether people who end up highly placed in public service are low on Honesty/Humility? This part of the argument seems entirely anecdotal.
Yep, my family has fled Marxists twice (so far) in Africa countries. The development path is Marxist--Bully--Crook. How do they sleep at night?
Finished Dr. Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics," which was short, sweet, and even funny at times. Maybe differing conceptions of "freedom" underpin each axis. I'd love to see the next level of analysis of this powerful framework to develop a synthesis. I will try to use it to unpack issues going forward.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
"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. They made some very costly errors."
I generally agree with your point but I think we have to be careful in arguing for letting markets do more than they can. While I lean toward agreeing with you on restricting activities because of covid, plenty of people think government didn't do enough. Are we sure we're right? We don't know the counter-factual for the lockdown. Maybe it would have been worse to do less. Also, I'd argue we underappreciate how important it was that government got one particular thing right. I suppose we could argue about whether FDA approvals should exist and also about how many trials were needed before releasing a vaccine to the public but there's little doubt Warpspeed speeded up production of vaccine and probably reduced the market price too (total cost to payers).
I suppose it could also be argued we wouldn't even have the mRNA technology without government funded research ... and our "broken" universities that did much of that research ... but those are rather different topics.
I don't think the development of mRNA technology is a good example of universities not being "broken". From the wikipedia article on Katalin Karikó:
"... Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community.[1][4] Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.
"... While Karikó has also been associated with the University of Pennsylvania, which would benefit financially from her eventual discovery, the university had actively discouraged her from pursuing research by underfunding and deprioritizing work on mRNA.[12][13] After being demoted by the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, Karikó was never granted tenure and joined BioNTech in 2013 after the university had declined to reinstate her."
I agree with you to some extent, but I wanted to point out that Sweden is often considered the counter-factual for lockdowns. At the time, people were aghast at how much higher the Covid death rate was in Sweden, as compared to neighboring countries such as Denmark. But then, afterwards, a study showed that the overall excess fatalities from all causes was actually lower in Sweden than in most other European countries. I'm not sure how accepted this is by the public health community, but it seems pretty important to me. It makes the point that you shouldn't base your policies on just one factor -- you need to consider all the factors.
As I said, I'm sympathetic to the opinion we should have reduced restrictions sooner than we did. Sweden provides some support to that end but it is far from conclusive. Among other things, it is a country of only 10 million that might not be representative. For example life expectancy is far greater than US, suggesting it is a healthier population that was less susceptible to severe COVID symptoms.
Other things being equal, the older you are, the more likely COVID was to make you sick or kill you. So, other things being equal, the greater life expectancy leading to a higher proportion of older people in Sweden should have made for a higher death rate. You are implicitly arguing that, when it comes to COVID mortality, an assumed healthierness of the elderly population more than cancelled out their higher numbers.
that's more or less correct but they are a little bit older and live A LOT longer. And I'm pretty sure the correlation with comorbidities is stronger than age.
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.
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.
Conspiracy thinking tends to be entirely ignorant of Hyek’s tacit knowledge observation. Kling’s comments regarding the technocratic failings of Covid policy is just one example of a real world consequence of humans just not being as organized and intelligent as conspiracy theorists might want to believe. Coincidently (perhaps ironically), recognizing that even the “smartest people” have such little control over world events must be a very frightening reality for these thinkers.
Has there ever been an empirical study of whether people who end up highly placed in public service are low on Honesty/Humility? This part of the argument seems entirely anecdotal.
I favor Aristotle’s gift of dualism.
Not the old kind of left or right; liberal or conservative. That’s so 19th century.
The key today is information. and for that we look to sources.
The choice is wisdom of crowds vs. curated knowledge; Individuals vs. State.
And the answer is both, actually.
Because crowds (for recency) are volatile, while old learning (for credibility) may grow obsolete.
Those are the choices today, and we play one against the other, to enjoy the best of both worlds.
Yep, my family has fled Marxists twice (so far) in Africa countries. The development path is Marxist--Bully--Crook. How do they sleep at night?
Finished Dr. Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics," which was short, sweet, and even funny at times. Maybe differing conceptions of "freedom" underpin each axis. I'd love to see the next level of analysis of this powerful framework to develop a synthesis. I will try to use it to unpack issues going forward.
"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.
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.
Nicely, and gently, done. By the way, I think rent-seeking is a bad term also. I use the term "privilege-seeking."
I agree. Someone not familiar with economic jargon might think that landlords and money lenders are bad.
Exactly.
Imaginary but plausible conversation between a landlord and his friend:
Friend: What are you doing this fine Saturday morning?
Landlord: I have to go over to my 4-plex and seek the rent of one tenant who is perpetually late.
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.
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
"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. They made some very costly errors."
I generally agree with your point but I think we have to be careful in arguing for letting markets do more than they can. While I lean toward agreeing with you on restricting activities because of covid, plenty of people think government didn't do enough. Are we sure we're right? We don't know the counter-factual for the lockdown. Maybe it would have been worse to do less. Also, I'd argue we underappreciate how important it was that government got one particular thing right. I suppose we could argue about whether FDA approvals should exist and also about how many trials were needed before releasing a vaccine to the public but there's little doubt Warpspeed speeded up production of vaccine and probably reduced the market price too (total cost to payers).
I suppose it could also be argued we wouldn't even have the mRNA technology without government funded research ... and our "broken" universities that did much of that research ... but those are rather different topics.
I don't think the development of mRNA technology is a good example of universities not being "broken". From the wikipedia article on Katalin Karikó:
"... Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community.[1][4] Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.
"... While Karikó has also been associated with the University of Pennsylvania, which would benefit financially from her eventual discovery, the university had actively discouraged her from pursuing research by underfunding and deprioritizing work on mRNA.[12][13] After being demoted by the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, Karikó was never granted tenure and joined BioNTech in 2013 after the university had declined to reinstate her."
Right. mRNA development doesn't mean universities aren't broken. UPenn screwing it up doesn't mean they are either.
I agree with you to some extent, but I wanted to point out that Sweden is often considered the counter-factual for lockdowns. At the time, people were aghast at how much higher the Covid death rate was in Sweden, as compared to neighboring countries such as Denmark. But then, afterwards, a study showed that the overall excess fatalities from all causes was actually lower in Sweden than in most other European countries. I'm not sure how accepted this is by the public health community, but it seems pretty important to me. It makes the point that you shouldn't base your policies on just one factor -- you need to consider all the factors.
As I said, I'm sympathetic to the opinion we should have reduced restrictions sooner than we did. Sweden provides some support to that end but it is far from conclusive. Among other things, it is a country of only 10 million that might not be representative. For example life expectancy is far greater than US, suggesting it is a healthier population that was less susceptible to severe COVID symptoms.
Other things being equal, the older you are, the more likely COVID was to make you sick or kill you. So, other things being equal, the greater life expectancy leading to a higher proportion of older people in Sweden should have made for a higher death rate. You are implicitly arguing that, when it comes to COVID mortality, an assumed healthierness of the elderly population more than cancelled out their higher numbers.
that's more or less correct but they are a little bit older and live A LOT longer. And I'm pretty sure the correlation with comorbidities is stronger than age.
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.