PLAGUE JOURNAL May 2020: Stringency, Virtue, & Statehood: Intellectuals Make up Explanations
Re-opening: mapping old ideologies onto our novel virus. Academics, libertarians, & political scientists explain the virus on podcasts.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Stringency
On a Quillette podcast in May (“Oxford’s Thomas Hale on Measuring the Variation in Government Response to COVID-19, 5/19/2020), host Jonathan Kay talks to Thomas Hale, an Associate Professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and one of the creators of a complex database designed to track governmental responses by their levels of pandemic “stringency.” Kay opens by saying, “in recent weeks, the discussion about COVID-19 has increasingly turned from the medical aspects of the disease to the often contentious debate about optimum policy response,” acknowledging that comparing policy responses from around the world is difficult, “so everyone naturally focuses on the national examples that best suit their argument.” He gets that right.
The University of Oxford Stringency index
All of these studies purporting to compare the “effectiveness” of policies require byzantine scorekeeping across a vast number of variables and are ultimately futile. The authors of the studies can get any result they are looking for. It’s impossible to measure and score the nearly infinite number of actions and interactions that may affect the death rate. But Hale is trying. He has a team of 100 Oxford students and staff entering the data. Like virtually everyone else, he believes that government policy is the answer to the riddle, and hasn’t considered nature.
They discuss the tracking tool, called “COVID-19: Government Response Stringency Index.” Like everyone, they look for patterns. Like everyone who is honest, they find none. Kay sees a similarity between the U.K. and the U.S., saying “both countries seemed to have been fairly laissez-faire at first, and then the stringency ramped up very quickly.” He wonders what countries with similar results have in common: “culture, geography, language groupings”? Hale says countries tend to copy their neighbors. Kay looks at Italy and says they had different policies in the north and the south, so how can we compare countries to one another when countries don’t even have consistent internal policies? Hale admits that it’s hard to measure countries as a whole, and says they’ll get into that in future revisions to the project. Kay points out that people might take actions that have nothing to do with government policy, and Hale agrees.
Although they recognize that these studies can be perplexing, they continue to look for patterns. Hale says that in Brazil, people began to limit their mobility before the government began to act, while in the U.K., people began to limit mobility only after the government began to act. He posits that where people trust their government, they will comply even in the absence of strict policies. Kay agrees, noting that he’s written about “high-trust, high-information societies like Sweden or some East Asian societies” where people trust their government and scientists. In these places, according to the thinking, citizens beat the coronavirus without high levels of governmental stringency. It’s the familiar argument: some groups of people are auto-obedient or pre-obedient. Kay and Blavatnik are looking for explanations to explain apparently random outcomes.
So why do the study? Why would we believe that Brazilians trust their government and their “experts” and do as they're told, when Brazil’s government is notoriously corrupt and had recently jailed many leaders, including a former president? Because we believe that human behavior determines all outcomes, and we want to find explanations that support our beliefs. Kay and Hale do not consider that Brazil is in the Southern Hemisphere, where not a single country has a high death rate, at least not yet. They are speaking in May (and I am writing this in May). Things will change when the earth tilts and the Southern Hemisphere enters its winter.
The discussion of policy continues. Hale says, “We need to know what works and what doesn’t work” so that the data can inform “evidence-based policy-making.” But there will be nothing to see, at least about lockdowns and “stringency.” Near the end of the discussion, Kay says,
I’m looking here at a graph that appears late in the report where you have the stringency level as the y variable and the reported number of reported COVID-19 cases reported logarithmically on the x axis, and you have a line down the middle, and so, countries that appear above the line have a higher stringency level in relation to the number of deaths. Below the line, they have a much lower stringency level as compared to what you might expect based on the number of deaths they had. And well below the line, so these are countries that are not stringent, you have the U.K., you have Spain, you have the United States, you have Sweden, almost zero in terms of its stringency. And then above the line you have Italy, Hong Kong, right on the line you have China, Iran, France.
He sighs and says, “It’s hard to see any broad pattern jump out at this. Is there a broad pattern that I’m missing, because I can’t see it?”
Hale admits, “Yeah, there’s not really a clear pattern,” and then lists a number of other things they will start looking at—none of which will show significant patterns either, because they are all about human behavior and demographics, while the virus is a piece of nature. Blavatnik says, “It’s a lot of randomness, to be honest,” and “Yeah, there’s not a strong relationship there. The graph is more to try to raise a puzzle more than answer a question.”
And there you have it. Despite the hours, the data, and the scores of people working on the project, the researchers have found nothing. At least Kay and Blavatnik are honest about it, unlike the mainstream press trying to make us believe in their astonishingly effective shutdowns. The headlines about human behavior never change. From the Washington Post we learn, “Peru took early, aggressive measures against the coronavirus. It’s still suffering one of Latin America’s largest outbreaks.” The word still doesn’t belong. If there is a relationship between lockdowns and results, causation probably runs the opposite direction. Northern Peru sits in gray wet weather in March, and Southern Peru sits in gray, wet, cool oceanic weather in June and July, so we know that things will be getting worse. Lockdowns have little to do with it other than sending people indoors where spreading occurs and keeping them out of the fresh air and sunshine that would help them.
A Libertarian View: The Fifth Column
On May 25th, three months into an experience that might have inspired curiosity and inquiry from journalists, I heard the latest episode of the libertarian podcast The Fifth Column, hosted by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch. (“Predicting Pandemics, Fixing Journalism,” 5/25/2020.) The Fifth Column prides itself on independent thinking and has a running feature called “Some Idiot Wrote This” in which the hosts skewer journalistic carelessness or bias. The hosts especially Foster are skeptical of government, and hosts and guests routinely criticize media on both sides of the political spectrum.
One of the guests was Balaji Srinivasan, an “entrepreneur” and “former CTO” in Silicon Valley, who opened the podcast by describing a West Coast ethos that allegedly allows people there to be more thoughtful and more comfortable with change, entropy, and endings than are people on the East Coast. In other words, he has the familiar cultural arrogance of Silicon Valley. He says, “There’s a greater degree of pressure to conform in East Coast corporate media circles than there is in others.” For our high coronavirus rates, he blames “American exceptionalism” and “Western arrogance,” saying the U.S. didn’t take the threat seriously because “the U.S. is number one, and it’s always been number one, and it will always be number one. . . .”
The other guest, Conor Friedersdorf, is an Atlantic staff writer and the founding editor of a newsletter called “The Best of Journalism.” Friedersdorf says that he has pointed out on Twitter that “New Zealand got the virus under control, and Australia did, and South Korea did, and Taiwan did, and, you know, Singapore is getting it under control, even if they don’t believe that China has, and there’s Austria, not Australia but Austria, in Europe, right, and Slovakia, and so on and so forth. . . .” He says we became “fat and happy” and “content” and “disconnected from reality.” He doesn’t notice that none of his examples of success are from northern latitudes near water, and he doesn’t notice that his examples have essentially the same results as their geographical neighbors, not their political kin: New Zealand is similar to Australia, Taiwan to China, Austria to Slovakia (although Slovakia, further inland from Austria, has the lower rates of the two).
For these journalists, who spend their days typing and talking at each other, nature doesn’t exist. Friedersdorf’s favorable view of Austria also reflects the tendency to confuse absolute numbers with per capita numbers. At the time he said this, Austria’s per capita fatality rate of 70 per million was nearly identical to Brazil’s 72 per million, yet we are regularly seeing headlines about the devastation in Brazil. The difference between Brazil and Austria is of course that we don’t like the Brazilian government, therefore happy to look only at total cases, which course are higher in a country of nearly 210 million than in a country of 9 million, even if they have the same fatality rate.
Friedersdorf says, “The U.S. has been completely on the world’s stage on this, has basically gotten invaded, and frankly defeated, by a virus, and is negotiating the terms of surrender right now.” He says that “other countries are fighting that off.” He adopts the standard view of America-as-failure. Even on a libertarian podcast, the view, at least from these guests, is doctrinaire.
The View from Political Scientists: Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama
On Yascha Mounk’s podcast, The Good Fight, Mounk talks to Francis Fukuyama, who praises East Asia for its success (“Francis Fukuyama on COVID-19,” 5/27/2020). In a discussion about which countries will emerge stronger from all this, Fukuyama says, “Clearly the part of the world that has been the most successful at containing the pandemic has been East Asia, but that includes Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, a lot of other countries in the region, so I think collectively they will be the beneficiary.” He predicts that the U.S. will be “crippled as a global power.”
Mounk questions him further about East Asia, agreeing that these countries have done better than others. Although neither Mounk nor Fukuyama mentions weather, only Japan among East Asian countries has temperatures that drop below the 50s. Singapore, for example, rarely drops below 75. Japan drops into the 30s, and Japan was the home of the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Yet Japan’s winds come from the west, from the landmass, unlike Northern Europe’s, which come from the water. Japan is mostly sunny in the winter, about 70% sunny in February. Temperatures rise quickly in the spring, with relatively few days in the dangerous zone between 32 and 40. Yet they are worth studying: with just a handful of fatalities per million, the population of Japan did much better than the passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship sitting in Tokyo Harbor. (As I’ve looked around the world, I find only a handful of places that have outperformed their weather, including Japan and the cities of Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia. These places have important things in common, including low obesity rates and high levels of vitamin D in the population.)
Mounk tries to figure out why so many Asian countries have done well despite having different political systems, citing “a democratic country like South Korea, a semi-democratic country like Singapore, or an autocratic country like China,” saying they have done better than autocracies such as Iran and Russia and democracies such as the U.S. and Italy. He is skeptical that previous experience with SARs alone, a commonly cited explanation, can make sense of the differences.
Fukuyama praises Asia in general, saying, “As a whole, beginning in the postwar period, these Asian countries have gone from being third-world countries to being fully modern industrialized countries in a much shorter time than any European country or the United States or Canada has succeeded in doing.” True enough, but why do we believe their economic or political success protected them from the coronavirus? The wealth of the U.S. and Northern Europe have rendered them less safe, not safer. He says all of the economically successful Asian countries have “a state,” and contrasts their general overall success in the second half of the twentieth century with other areas of the world, including Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, which are unstable, riven by tribalism. He says, “Both in dealing with an epidemic and in dealing with economic development, you need a state, and you need a modern state, meaning a state that is reasonably impersonal.”
As with other intellectuals and newscasters, Fukuyama grafts his existing narrative onto our novel pandemic. If average working stiffs didn’t have to produce results for a living, a truck driver might write articles telling us that trucks crush the coronavirus or a baker might tell us on a podcast that flour smothers the virus. Because Fukuyama writes books about statehood, he believes that having a well-established state helps fight the coronavirus. He mentions his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Oder, saying “China was really the first world civilization to create a modern state, and that happened in 221 BC in the Chin Unification.” He says they had “state capacity at their beck and call and I think that’s what’s continuing to help them in this current crises.” How exactly this mechanism works, he does not say. He contrasts the stability in East Asia with the instability “throughout the Middle East,” including “Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya,” which are “all consumed by local ethnic, religious, tribal identities.” He hasn’t noticed all of these countries have extremely low rates of coronavirus. To use the common term, they “crushed it,” although their political structures has nothing to do with it.
Mounk is willing to follow Fukuyama’s argument “in terms of contrasting China to India or China to Kenya” but not when it comes to differences between East Asia and the U.S. or Western Europe. Fukuyama’s response is to blame Trump (not by name, but with the word “populist”), which ignores the 15 or so Western European and Scandinavian countries joining the U.S. at the sorry end of the corona list that do not have populist leaders.
Now consider all the places Fukuyama names that suffer from slow development, factionalism, and general instability: Africa, South Asia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya. China, with its long history of statehood, has a death rate per million of just 3. Well done. Who else has the same death rate? Many places, as it turns out, including India, Bangladesh (which is in South Asia), Mali, Niger, Mauritania, the Congo (all in Africa), Haiti, Jamaica. Many African countries have even lower rates, including, with just one death per million, Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Comoros. And there are even more countries with fewer than one death per million, including Libya, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan (all in the Middle East); Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Laos, Fiji (all in Southeast Asia). In fact, there are more than 60 countries with fewer than one death per million as of the end of May, and virtually all of them are in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, or the Caribbean. They are equatorial, either hot desert (North Africa, the Middle East) or tropical (Central Africa, Southeast Asia, parts of Northern South America). A few of the places are too cold for the coronavirus: Mongolia, Greenland, the Faroe Islands.
It is curious that Fukuyama cites three or four countries that he believes have been effective in dealing with the coronavirus because of their long-established statehood yet ignores the scores of countries that have better outcomes, virtually all of which are in the regions he said are ill-equipped to “deal with” a pandemic. Fukuyama is famous for his book The End of History. Perhaps it’s hard to see history or a great many other things if you consider only a few countries and slot them into your preferred categories without looking
at results.
Mounk—naturally—likes to imagine a different outcome if Barack Obama were president, saying, “Without a doubt the response from the administration would have been much more efficient and serious.” Serious how? Serious like the responses in France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, all of which had the same general approach as the U.S. and the same general results despite having more appealing political leaders? These conversations are always vague, the examples always cherry-picked or even contradictory to the argument.