On the economic front, we would have had to choose either to actually suppress the virus, in which case we get much better outcomes all around, or to accept that the virus couldn’t be stopped, *which also produces better economic outcomes. *
Our technological advancement gave us the choice to make massively larger Sacrifices to the Gods rather than deal with the situation. And as we all know, choices are bad. We also are, in my model, much more inclined to make such sacrifices now than we were in the past,
So, by ‘Sacrifices to the Gods’ I assume you’re referring to the entirety of our suppression spending—because it’s not all been wasted money, even if a large part of it has. In other places you use that phrase to refer specifically to ineffective preventative measures.
‘We also are, in my model, much more inclined to make such sacrifices now than we were in the past ’- this is a very important point that I’m glad you recognise—there has been a shift in values such that we (as individuals, as well as governments) are guaranteed to take the option of attempting to avoid getting the virus and sacrificing the economy to a greater degree than in 1919, or 1350, because our society values human life and safety differently.
And realistically, if we’d approached this with pre-2020 values and pre-2020 technology, we’d have ‘chosen’ to let the disease spread and suffered a great deal of death and destruction—but that option is no longer open to us. For better, as I think, or for worse, as you think.
You can do the abstract a cost-benefit calculation about whether the other harms of the disease have caused more damage than the disease, but it won’t tell you anything about whether the act of getting governments to stop lockdowns and suppression measures will be better or worse than having them to try. Robin Hanson directly confuses these two in his argument that we are over-preventing covid.
We see variations in both kinds of policy across space and time, due both to private and government choices, all of which seem modestly influenceable by intellectuals like Caplan, Cowen, and I...
But we should also consider the very real possibility that the political and policy worlds aren’t very capable of listening to our advice about which particular policies are more effective than others. They may well mostly just hear us say “more” or “less”, such as seems to happen in medical and education spending debates.
Here Hanson is equivocating between (correctly) identifying the entire cost of COVID-19 prevention as due to ‘both private and government choices’ and then focussing on just ‘the political and policy worlds’ in response to whether we should argue for less prevention. The claim (which may or may not be true) that ‘we overall are over-preventing covid relative to the abstract alternative where we don’t’ gets equated to ‘therefore telling people to overall reduce spending on covid prevention will be beneficial on cost-benefit terms’.
Telling governments to spend less money is much more likely to work than ordering people to have different values. So making governments spend less on covid prevention diminishes their more effective preventative actions while doing very little about the source of most of the covid prevention spending (individual action).
Like-for-like comparisons where values are similar but policy is different (like Sweden and its neighbours), make it clear that given the underlying values we have, which lead to the behaviours that we have observed this year, the imperative ‘prevent covid less’ leads to outcomes that are across the board worse.
Or consider Sweden, which had a relatively non-panicky Covid messaging, no matter what you think of their substantive policies. Sweden didn’t do any better on the gdp front, and the country had pretty typical adverse mobility reactions. (NB: These are the data that you don’t see the “overreaction” critics engage with — at all. And there is more where this came from.)
How about Brazil? While they did some local lockdowns, they have a denialist president, a weak overall response, and a population used to a high degree of risk. The country still saw a gdp plunge and lots of collateral damage. You might ponder this graph, causality is tricky and the “at what margin” question is trickier yet, but it certainly does not support what Bryan is claiming about the relevant trade-offs.
So, with the firm understanding that given the values we have, and the behaviour patterns we will inevitably adopt, telling people to prevent the pandemic less is worse economically and worse in terms of deaths, we can then ask the further, more abstract question that you ask—what if our values were different? That is, what if the option was available to us because we were actually capable of letting the virus rip.
I wanted to put that disclaimer in because discussing whether we have developed the right societal values is irrelevant for policy decisions going forward—but still important for other reasons. I’d be quite concerned if our value drift over the last century or so was revealed as overall maladapted, but it’s important to talk about the fact that this is the question that’s at stake when we ask if society is over-preventing covid. I am not asking whether lockdowns or suppression are worth it now—they are.
You seem to think that our values should be different; that it’s at least plausible that signalling is leading us astray and causing us to overvalue the direct damage of covid, like lives lost, in place of concern for overall damage. Unlike Robin Hanson, though, you aren’t recommending we attempt to tell people to go off and have different values—you’re simply noting that you think our tendency to make larger sacrifices is a mistake.
...even when the trade-offs are similar, which ties into my view that simulacra and maze levels are higher, with a larger role played by fear of motive ambiguity. We might have been willing to do challenge trials or other actual experiments, and have had a much better handle on things quicker on many levels.
There are two issues here—one is that it’s not at all clear whether the initial cost-benefit calculation about over-prevention is even correct. You don’t claim to know if we are over-preventing in this abstract sense (compared to us having different values and individually not avoiding catching the disease), and the evidence that we are over-preventing comes from a twitter poll of Bryan Caplan’s extremely libertarian-inclined followers who he told to try as hard as possible to be objective in assessing pandemic costs because he asked them what ‘the average American’ would value (Come on!!). Tyler Cowen briefly alludes to how woolly the numbers are here, ‘I don’t agree with Bryan’s numbers, but the more important point is one of logic’.
The second issue is whether our change in values is an aberration caused by runaway signalling or reflects a legitimate, correct valuation of human life. Now, the fact that a lot of our prevention spending has been wasteful counts in favour of the signalling explanation, but on the other hand there’s a ton of evidence that we in the past, in general, valued life too little. [There’s also the point that this seems like exactly a case where a signalling explanation is hard to falsify, an issue I talked about here,
I think the correct story is that the value shift has been good and bad—valuing human life more strongly has been good, but along with that its become more valuable to credibly fake valuing human life, which has been bad.
Agree with habryka that I don’t agree with all of this but it’s well stated. I don’t think it much disagrees with the claims in OP, even the implied claims, rather it’s making a different argument.
I think the opening of the comment interprets my claim about how much of our current response is unproductive in a way that I didn’t intend and don’t endorse. I agree that some of our spending has been worthwhile on the margin, if the only alternative was to do nothing beyond preventing action. And I agree that if government is determined to prevent useful private action (e.g. “We have 2020 values”), it does not then have the means to prevent local private costly preventative action, so doing basically no prevention isn’t a real option.
Which is that under 2020 values and 2020 technology, and with the only choice being ‘prevent more’ or ‘prevent less’ that preventing less backfired on all fronts when nations tried it, because preventing less meant more private prevention that proved more expensive e.g. Sweden and Brazil. Because that’s the only thing we are capable of executing—the government can shut down useful private responses and not do anything itself, but in terms of realistic choices we can talk about, it can neither do better useful things or allow others to do them, only do more of standard-issue-prevention or less.
I do think that if you compare different US state responses, you get a different answer than comparing Sweden to Norway (which I understand why people think is fair but is a very high bar to clear). I don’t know to what you compare Brazil, a country that has had shrinking GDP and a death spiral economy for many years now. Is this economic response bad? E.g. EWJ is +10% YoY, which underperforms Argentina but outperforms Mexico. Argentina was previously growing, and shrunk more in Q2 than Brazil, etc etc.
Anyway, that’s all for me here, calling the comments to a close for the week for Shabbat.
While I disagree with substantial portions of this, I found it really clear and valuable, and strong-upvoted it. Thank you for writing down your arguments in such a clear way!
So, by ‘Sacrifices to the Gods’ I assume you’re referring to the entirety of our suppression spending—because it’s not all been wasted money, even if a large part of it has. In other places you use that phrase to refer specifically to ineffective preventative measures.
‘We also are, in my model, much more inclined to make such sacrifices now than we were in the past ’- this is a very important point that I’m glad you recognise—there has been a shift in values such that we (as individuals, as well as governments) are guaranteed to take the option of attempting to avoid getting the virus and sacrificing the economy to a greater degree than in 1919, or 1350, because our society values human life and safety differently.
And realistically, if we’d approached this with pre-2020 values and pre-2020 technology, we’d have ‘chosen’ to let the disease spread and suffered a great deal of death and destruction—but that option is no longer open to us. For better, as I think, or for worse, as you think.
You can do the abstract a cost-benefit calculation about whether the other harms of the disease have caused more damage than the disease, but it won’t tell you anything about whether the act of getting governments to stop lockdowns and suppression measures will be better or worse than having them to try. Robin Hanson directly confuses these two in his argument that we are over-preventing covid.
Here Hanson is equivocating between (correctly) identifying the entire cost of COVID-19 prevention as due to ‘both private and government choices’ and then focussing on just ‘the political and policy worlds’ in response to whether we should argue for less prevention. The claim (which may or may not be true) that ‘we overall are over-preventing covid relative to the abstract alternative where we don’t’ gets equated to ‘therefore telling people to overall reduce spending on covid prevention will be beneficial on cost-benefit terms’.
Telling governments to spend less money is much more likely to work than ordering people to have different values. So making governments spend less on covid prevention diminishes their more effective preventative actions while doing very little about the source of most of the covid prevention spending (individual action).
Like-for-like comparisons where values are similar but policy is different (like Sweden and its neighbours), make it clear that given the underlying values we have, which lead to the behaviours that we have observed this year, the imperative ‘prevent covid less’ leads to outcomes that are across the board worse.
So, with the firm understanding that given the values we have, and the behaviour patterns we will inevitably adopt, telling people to prevent the pandemic less is worse economically and worse in terms of deaths, we can then ask the further, more abstract question that you ask—what if our values were different? That is, what if the option was available to us because we were actually capable of letting the virus rip.
I wanted to put that disclaimer in because discussing whether we have developed the right societal values is irrelevant for policy decisions going forward—but still important for other reasons. I’d be quite concerned if our value drift over the last century or so was revealed as overall maladapted, but it’s important to talk about the fact that this is the question that’s at stake when we ask if society is over-preventing covid. I am not asking whether lockdowns or suppression are worth it now—they are.
You seem to think that our values should be different; that it’s at least plausible that signalling is leading us astray and causing us to overvalue the direct damage of covid, like lives lost, in place of concern for overall damage. Unlike Robin Hanson, though, you aren’t recommending we attempt to tell people to go off and have different values—you’re simply noting that you think our tendency to make larger sacrifices is a mistake.
There are two issues here—one is that it’s not at all clear whether the initial cost-benefit calculation about over-prevention is even correct. You don’t claim to know if we are over-preventing in this abstract sense (compared to us having different values and individually not avoiding catching the disease), and the evidence that we are over-preventing comes from a twitter poll of Bryan Caplan’s extremely libertarian-inclined followers who he told to try as hard as possible to be objective in assessing pandemic costs because he asked them what ‘the average American’ would value (Come on!!). Tyler Cowen briefly alludes to how woolly the numbers are here, ‘I don’t agree with Bryan’s numbers, but the more important point is one of logic’.
The second issue is whether our change in values is an aberration caused by runaway signalling or reflects a legitimate, correct valuation of human life. Now, the fact that a lot of our prevention spending has been wasteful counts in favour of the signalling explanation, but on the other hand there’s a ton of evidence that we in the past, in general, valued life too little. [There’s also the point that this seems like exactly a case where a signalling explanation is hard to falsify, an issue I talked about here,
I think the correct story is that the value shift has been good and bad—valuing human life more strongly has been good, but along with that its become more valuable to credibly fake valuing human life, which has been bad.
Agree with habryka that I don’t agree with all of this but it’s well stated. I don’t think it much disagrees with the claims in OP, even the implied claims, rather it’s making a different argument.
I think the opening of the comment interprets my claim about how much of our current response is unproductive in a way that I didn’t intend and don’t endorse. I agree that some of our spending has been worthwhile on the margin, if the only alternative was to do nothing beyond preventing action. And I agree that if government is determined to prevent useful private action (e.g. “We have 2020 values”), it does not then have the means to prevent local private costly preventative action, so doing basically no prevention isn’t a real option.
Which is that under 2020 values and 2020 technology, and with the only choice being ‘prevent more’ or ‘prevent less’ that preventing less backfired on all fronts when nations tried it, because preventing less meant more private prevention that proved more expensive e.g. Sweden and Brazil. Because that’s the only thing we are capable of executing—the government can shut down useful private responses and not do anything itself, but in terms of realistic choices we can talk about, it can neither do better useful things or allow others to do them, only do more of standard-issue-prevention or less.
I do think that if you compare different US state responses, you get a different answer than comparing Sweden to Norway (which I understand why people think is fair but is a very high bar to clear). I don’t know to what you compare Brazil, a country that has had shrinking GDP and a death spiral economy for many years now. Is this economic response bad? E.g. EWJ is +10% YoY, which underperforms Argentina but outperforms Mexico. Argentina was previously growing, and shrunk more in Q2 than Brazil, etc etc.
Anyway, that’s all for me here, calling the comments to a close for the week for Shabbat.
While I disagree with substantial portions of this, I found it really clear and valuable, and strong-upvoted it. Thank you for writing down your arguments in such a clear way!