Three archetypes / In the book, economists Paul Frijters of the London School of Economics and Gigi Foster of the University of New South Wales team up with economic consultant and freelance journalist Michael Baker to explain the COVID policy response. It’s a broadside against what might be called the “COVID Political Complex.”
The book tells its story using three character archetypes. The first is Jane, who understandably fears what COVID will do, embraces lockdowns, willingly sacrifices freedom and convenience in the name of civic duty, and wants the government to do something about those who resist lockdowns and mandates. She is the Facebook or Nextdoor busybody who thinks she hears gunshots every time a door closes and who calls the cops on her neighbors because she saw them through the window watching football with friends while unmasked.
The second archetype is James, an opportunist in the board room or capitol building who sees in COVID a golden chance to seize power or riches. He claims to be following “the science” on how to handle the pandemic, not understanding that science can only provide what are thought to be facts about the disease, not value judgments about how to respond to it. Worse, he plays fast and loose with the facts and excuses it by saying his noble lies benefit those who can’t handle the truth. James lives by the politician’s credo from the British show Yes, Prime Minister: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.” Projecting confidence and being decisive trump other considerations. And, despite his belief that he is coolly analytical, when his intellect tells him one thing and his incentives tell him another, he often follows his incentives.
James also seems to think that his greatness of soul excuses him from the rules he wants others to follow. We see this archetype in the public health officials who admitted they had played armchair psychologist by advising people not to buy facemasks early in the pandemic for fear that there wouldn’t be enough masks for frontline health workers and by delaying vaccine trials and approvals so as to appear deliberative. Other examples are the many political leaders and government authorities who pushed for public shutdowns and quarantines but then personally violated those restrictions. Finally, there’s the bizarre problem that initial debates about who should get priority in receiving the first doses of the new vaccines were not about minimizing COVID contagion but about who merited early vaccination. (The Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane has written splendidly on this.)
The book’s third archetype is Jasmine, an independent and skeptical thinker. She isn’t credulous like Jane, and she has a bit of a contrarian streak. She’s not satisfied with mere appeals to authority; she wants to know the argument, and she is aware of tradeoffs and unintended consequences. We hear from Jasmine-types throughout the book, and they are dismayed at what people are willing to do and sacrifice because politicians and people in lab coats tell them to. They also explain the pandemic’s evolution through the eyes of Jane and James. It’s an illuminating exercise.
Consequences beyond contagion / The authors divide the pandemic into three stages. There was “the Great Fear” from January to March 2020. “The Illusion of Control” followed from April through December 2020, as the first vaccines were developed, tested, and began rolling out. Finally, there’s the phase we’re in now: “the End Games.” The authors document what Friedrich Hayek called “the abuse and decline of reason” at every stage.
People advocating lockdowns, mask mandates, and other interventions might protest that they are just following the science, and they might be incredulous at the very idea that we should question what experts say. One of the problems with exalted expertise, however, is that it ignores a lot of important tradeoffs. Frijters, Foster, and Baker explore this throughout the book but especially in chapter 5, “The Tragedy.” In the name of a single and exclusive goal—limiting transmission—policymakers unleashed many unintended consequences. These range from relatively minor inconveniences like having one more thing to worry about (asking “Do I have a mask?” every time I leave the house), to the dystopian (not knowing what any of my students look like from the bridge of their nose down), to the devastating (enormous numbers of people pushed into poverty by COVID policy-related economic disruptions).
The book’s most interesting chapter is chapter 6, “Science During the Great Panic: Finest Hour or Worst Cock-Up?” It’s an interesting study in how initial conditions matter in scientific discussions. A lot of the early analyses started with suspect numbers and assumptions, but they were sanctioned by early peer review and not questioned as rigorously as they should have been. Scientists weren’t skeptical enough, they argue, of initial estimates of Infection Mortality Rates and Case Mortality Rates.
Lockdowns, mandates, and other expert-directed central plans are suspect because they ignore what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place.” Armed with this knowledge, we can take expert estimates of different probabilities and make what is, in our considered judgment, the best decisions for our families. A central planner or modeler cannot have this local knowledge; it is decentralized and often tacit, and it cannot confront the planner or modeler as data.
A lot of policy made in the name of science is, I think, eschatological rather than scientific, and an analogy the authors draw between COVID science and the medieval priesthood is appropriate. That you can buy devotional prayer candles featuring prominent government COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci is a clever joke, but like most jokes it reveals some important and uncomfortable truths.
Criticisms / No book is perfect, of course, and The Great Covid Panic is no exception. I’m skeptical of Frijters, Foster, and Baker’s inequality-and-plutocracy narrative, both in the United States (see Phillip Magness et al.‘s March 2022 Economic Journal article “How Pronounced Is the U‑Curve?”) and globally.
The penultimate chapter, “What’s Next—and What Have We Learned?” is a little disappointing. It’s largely speculative, which is fine; however, some of the speculations distract from the book’s overall message. I suspect this was, in part, a product of the need to get the book out quickly.
The chapter offers several proposals that worry me. First, there’s a call for creating a World Anti-Hysteria Organization that could be given the ability to shut down global social media if it senses panic. This is an especially troubling suggestion in the wake of recent internet suppression in Cuba and Russia. It is also odd that this proposal appears near the end of a book that so clearly documents policy failure after policy failure.
The authors also suggest that the European Science Foundation fund “New Schools of Thought” in direct opposition to the establishment consensus, to combat groupthink. I think we undervalue dissent, but such new schools of thought are already being funded by people like George Soros through, for example, the Central European University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
They also suggest that societies “treat compulsive attention to mobile phones as substance abuse, or an addiction like drugs, alcohol, or tobacco.” I’m somewhat sympathetic to this because watching a room full of 19-year-old college students go an hour without checking their phones is like watching someone go through heroin withdrawal, but the market is already ahead of them. A quick Google search for “social media addiction treatment” turns up almost 1.2 million results. Furthermore, people can get out of the social media sewer with the help of web-blocking software. I’m not sure what public policies like an anti-hysteria organization or medicalization of Facebook addiction would add.
Finally, the authors suggest people channel religious fanaticism into “building divine artificial intelligence machines.” To their credit, they note, “We are not very convinced of this idea ourselves and it carries many possible risks.” Nature and nature’s God produced bumbling jumbles of fat and gristle that can comprehend themselves and produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Ethiopian lamb dishes, and Star Wars. I doubt a golden calf or new Tower of Babel or godbot.ai will stir the soul. There is also, of course, the possibility that godbot.ai comes up with a very creative interpretation of the laws of robotics that turns our world into an Isaac Asimov book.
Despite these criticisms, this is the kind of book that needed to be written, and there needs to be many others like it. Liberty and prosperity will return as the pandemic wanes; however, they will return in modified, less lustrous form, as Robert Higgs explained over 30 years ago in Crisis and Leviathan. The advocates of lockdowns and mandates are calling for “bold, persistent experimentation” just like Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his 1932 address at Oglethorpe University. I suspect that, just like the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression, the COVID panic will end up being an example of a cure that is worse than the disease. Better to learn that now than never.
