On Coronavirus and ideology, I can’t but echo this reflection by Michael Huemer (on his Facebook page):
A few days ago, it looked like people’s opinions on the seriousness of the coronavirus were correlated with their political ideology. Like, Republicans were thinking it was overblown or a hoax, and Democrats thinking it was a disaster. I don’t know if that’s still true, or if people are moving toward consensus.
This is obvious, but maybe some of us forget it?: You can’t figure out something like that based on your political ideology. Your political ideology shouldn’t be telling you whether to worry about a new disease or not. Because your political ideology (unless it’s very strange) shouldn’t have unusual views about how bad death from disease is, nor will it contain scientific, medical beliefs.
E.g., if people have strong negative rights, or if government is untrustworthy, that tells us nothing about how contagious or how deadly some new virus is that we’ve never seen before. So please try not to form beliefs about stuff like the latter, based on stuff like the former.
Let’s face it, this is true of libertarians, too. Now, one thing libertarians know is that emergencies are the health of the State: Leviathan, indeed, is fed crisis after crisis (remember Robert Higgs’s enlightening book). But the fact that after a crisis we end up with more government than before, it does not necessarily mean that the crisis was not there.
I get plenty of e-mails from friends thorough the world, who are astonished by the measures, including semi-total lock down, taken by the Italian government. As they are friends of mine, they tend to be politically on the right, perhaps not the greatest fans of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, yet more sympathetic with them than with their opponents. Most of these friends of mine thought the Covid19 crisis was but a sign of irrational “scare” on the part of Italians. Alas, now they are gradually changing their mind. Libertarians who, on the other hand, did not underestimate the risk included IEA’s Christopher Snowdon, Steve Davies and Matt Ridley.
Now we need not to go to the other extreme: that is, assuming that because the crisis is real, it will not end up with a major increase of the size of the government. I think we will. The German Minister of the Economy suggested pharmaceutical industries could be nationalized, though he does not expect “many” if such nationalizations to happen. I think freedom of movement is and will be for the time being the first casualty of this crisis. We will see how the crisis is handled by the US authority – that will make a difference to the world more than anything else.
I have a nightmare, cyberpunk scenario.
The vaccine is not developed for 12-15 months, and even then, at the beginning, is in scarce supply. Such scarcity is worsened by trade barriers erected, for matters of “national safety”, in the meanwhile.
People keep being, therefore, effectively quarantined for months. This is a manageable situation for some people, but an impossible one for others. Large scale bankruptcies and mass unemployment bring governments to adopt some kind of universal income scheme. Such schemes allow a fair amount of people to continue to kick the can. Few business sectors are doing well: telcos, over-the-top companies, shops that provide home delivery. Drones become common, as to answer worries about hygiene and sanitation.
These new burdens to the taxpayers can’t be sustained even with a spiraling public deficit. Therefore we witness a growing taxation on those assets hold by the supposedly “wealthy” part of the population, if not outright nationalization of some of the hens lying golden eggs (beginning with telcos).
All of this changes our life so profoundly, that a burgeoning inequality between those who can work using the Internet, and those who cannot, make the latter a more or less a permanent burden on society: this breeds dependency and substantially weaken the entrepreneurial spirit, which is of course also wrecked by activities “in presence” becoming outlawed and thus making a bunch of kinds of small businesses impossible to start.
I am not saying that this will happen, neither I am saying this is likely to happen. This is a nightmare scenario. But it is kind of the first time in my life in which cyberpunk novels (full of similar stories) look not so detached from real world possibilities.
In short, I would advise libertarians not to be “minimizers” simply because they care about individual rights that will be effected by containment and mitigation strategies. The problem is real. Our worries have a sound bases too, and we will need to work to keep, preserve and get back to a more liberal normality as soon as possible. But denial won’t make us more credible nor more ideas stronger.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Mar 13 2020 at 8:08pm
I agree that ideology should not affect our assessment of risk, but it will, for everyone. A Beyesian starts with a prior on the credibility of any new piece of information and this will be tempered by both ideological interpretation of past threats/excessively costly measures to deal with them and temperament. Plus, it is hard to distinguish a belief that a) the the threat is not worth the cost of measure X (information about threats seldom arrive a pure probabilities of X but with some explicit or implied policy action) from b) the threat is not very great/the threat is being over hyped. Hopefully as new information comes in yesterday’s data become today’s priors and one can evolve to a better estimate.
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Scott Sumner
Mar 14 2020 at 2:13pm
You said:
“I agree that ideology should not affect our assessment of risk, but it will, for everyone.”
That’s false. My view of issues like global warming and the coronavirus has never been influenced in the slightest by my (libertarian) ideology.
Mark Bahner
Mar 14 2020 at 11:19pm
I changed my mind on the coronavirus without changing my basically libertarian ideology:
February 29…just a problem for the elderly Chinese
March 2…significant problem even for U.S. not-so-elderly
As I wrote in my March 2nd comments, the deaths in the state of Washington were a shock to me (though if I’d paid closer attention to South Korea, they shouldn’t have been).
Phil H
Mar 15 2020 at 3:49am
I agree with Scott on this. There are clearly some things that don’t have to be political (or commercial). They can be politicised, and that may be a good or bad thing. I think one of the success stories of the 20th century was depoliticising justice and medicine, so that even though politicians may make laws, a very very strong norm of individual cases not being subject to political intervention was established; and in medicine, a very very strong norm of listening to knowledgeable medical authorities was established. At the individual, operational level, these issues were depoliticised.
It’s not impossible that that could happen for major public health issues too – vaccines were a non-political issue for a long time. Public health is obviously always more likely to be dragged back into the political sphere than individual health. But it can be done. And when an issue is generally (in the media) not treated as a political issue, people will form opinions on it in relatively non-politicised ways. I think!
R R Schoettker
Mar 16 2020 at 3:26pm
The idea that “medical authority” is ‘non-political’ in an age where the vast majority of its professional ‘credentials’ are State sanctioned and also the funding for training, hospitals and pharmaceutical patenting and regulation is by government entities; is a view that has failed to grasp the significance and accuracy of the old adage “He who pays the piper, calls the tune”. In a society where everything is primarily influenced if not overtly directed and controlled by political entities then by definition, everything is political. The same reality exists for the “media”.
Rebes
Mar 13 2020 at 9:02pm
“A few days ago, it looked like people’s opinions on the seriousness of the coronavirus were correlated with their political ideology.”
Same can be said about the climate change debate. Won’t read many articles about it for some time, but when they come back, they will again be hopelessly ideological.
Mark Bahner
Mar 14 2020 at 11:35pm
As an engineer, the situation fascinates me. There are a whole range of options, with various costs and benefits. It would be great if someone, even well after the fact, analyzes all the various options taken (and some not taken) and the likely costs and benefits. (No one will probably ever know the true costs versus benefits, since there is no counterfactual Earth #2 as a control.)
For example:
What does closing airports to various foreign nations cost, and how many cases are avoided (benefits)?
How about shutting down the NBA season, and the NCAA basketball tournament? What do those cost, and what are the estimated benefits?
What are the benefits and costs of the CDC requiring that all tests be approved by them?
What would be the costs and benefits, for example, technology prizes for quickly developing and deploying coronavirus tests and vaccines?
What is the global cost of every day without a vaccine, and what are the costs (e.g., adverse reactions) and benefits of developing and deploying vaccine(s) in say, 2 months, rather than 12-18 months? Would it make sense to cooperate globally on vaccine(s)?
Matt
Mar 15 2020 at 5:24pm
I think the explanation for the ideological divide has far more to do with the social, cultural and media siloing of the people who lean ideologically one way or the other than the ideologies themselves. It’s shaped more by news sources and peer-reinforcement of narratives than by ideology, although ideology may be the initial spark.
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