Conversation

Macabre thing about covid is that the same demographics are at highest risk whether you open up slowly or quickly — the poor and unhealthy. Only question is whether they die of covid or destitution+desperation. If you try to minimize deaths, I think they end up being balanced?
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The perverse incentive: every non-minimal death rate has TWO solution points — a slow-reopen one and a fast-reopen one, and the fast-reopen has less GDP loss per death. Moral hazard here is if you start with an “acceptable” body count you’ll want to err on side of fast reopen
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Now, since these curves are obviously hard to estimate with any degree of confidence, most people will in practice go for “acceptable body count” thinking. The more surveillance tech you have the better you can estimate these curves and the smaller the gap between p11 and p12.
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This creates a second moral hazard: if you want a fast reopen, you *don’t* want a lot of test-and-trace surveillance because of the chances the answer will be too far out past your economic preference. Blindness helps the fast-reopen case so you’ll make that a moral cause.
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You’ll derp about courage and grit (of course you will, because you’re likely in a low-risk group) and make a civil liberties anti-tracking case for fast reopen *without* surveillance. Surprise surprise that’s exactly what the economy-first types tend to do.
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Replying to
Consider this speculative curve, capturing that fear... that past a point the economic breakdown is apocalyptic and irrecoverable
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I won’t attempt to sketch the compound speculation but there are 2 cases here: A: the minimum death point lies before the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B: the minimum death point lies after the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B is a fake case, why?
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Because if the min point is past the knee than the assumption of steadily falling covid deaths is wrong.... there’s no hospitals in a true economic collapse. And I don’t mean collapse in numbers bankers care about, I mean actual collapse of the economy.
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So yes, we should ramp up test-and-trace because it can’t hurt and will improve the decision, but it won’t actually spare us the hard reopening-speed vs death-rate choices. Perfect measurement diesnt solve the actual problem. It only frames the moral dilemma more sharply.
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But what nobody is talking about, because it’s fun to pretend the economy only matters to bankers, is a *different* surveillance problem. Not test-and-trace but location of collapse knee. It’s not about symmetrical V recovery vs asymmetrical V It’s about recovery vs no recovery
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What’s the point of no return for the economy? This ain’t the low-tech works of 1918/Spanish Flu. This is 2020. We live in a very complex world atop an enormously complex tech stack. It can undergo far deeper collapse than the 1918 stack. There IS a knee to the collapse curve.
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A big part of confusion is that “the economy” is being conflated with “wealth machine favoring the wealthy” on the one hand (Economy A) and with “measure of state of health of physical machine of civilization” (Economy B) on the other. Economy A is politics. B is engineering.
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Both are broken. Rich people want to save A and sacrifice a lot of B that they don’t use. Poor people want to save B and sacrifice a lot of A that they don’t use. Save stock values, sacrifice food banks OR Sacrifice stock values, save food banks
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So we’re actually talking about two separate, coupled things when we talk about saving the economy — the machine itself, and the ownership value of the machine. The early reopen people are wealth-savers/machine-vandals. The late reopen people are machine-savers/wealth vandals.
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Here’s the thing — the later the reopen, the more wealth will be destroyed to save the machine. Politically this means one of two things: socialism (via nationalization of financially distressed assets) or state collapse (via public bankruptcy to bail out wealth). Choose.
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It’s fairly clear that we’ll choose BOTH. Only question is in which order? You might have nationalization followed by reprivatization a la Russia, leading to a gangster-oligarch state. Or you might have massive bailout followed by socialist revolution to reclaim looted public.
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If it isn’t obvious, I’m talking about western style liberal democracies. Group quarantine based containment is constrained strongly here by political DNA. Korea is not actually a good comparison for the west. Not all nominal liberal democracies are the same.
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It’s a cliche but it’s also a deep truth — the liberal democratic west owes all its strengths AND weaknesses to precisely the ways in which it is not like those authoritarian states that find it “easy” to contain Covid in the short term.
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And to the extent the world is a connected web with the fates of these supposedly “better” states dependent on the west in a myriad ways — it doesn’t matter that they’ve done better in short-term local ways. In the long term everybody’s fate is linked to what ha;pens to the west.
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Country comparisons are kinda stupid anyway. It’s like left leg laughing at the right leg for developing gangrene. Coupled fates. Either whole world makes it out of this together or there’s so much hurt instore for all it doesn’t matter that you did well for first few months.
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The great diversity of the world’s systems of governance is a feature of how it works. “Why can’t we all be like Korea?” makes about as much sense as “why aren’t we all ethnically Korean?” Because the world doesn’t work that way. It’s a bunch of different places, not one place.
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All the objections I get to threads like this sound similar to me to “why can’t we donate excess Idaho potatoes to food banks” Who’s “we”? Which subset of we is going to organize the truck fleet to do this? Who will pay the drivers? “Why can’t we be like country X” is the same
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In an ideal world, excess potatoes would miraculously be teleported to hungry people because Twitter Saint willed it. In an ideal world, all diffs between Korea and the US vanish miraculously because Twitter Saint willed it.
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Solve for the country/systems you have, not the one you wish you had. You can ignore constraints to make bad comparisons to blame people you hate, but those constraints don’t actually go away. Potatoes still need trucking. The US still has an electoral college. Deal with it.
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It is easy to work yourself up into a self-righteous lather and feel like you’re a better person than the Bad People who are preventing the Obvious Solution that way. You might even be right about them being bad if not about how the systems work. But it doesn’t solve problems.
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Interesting that test-and-trace people keep trying to tell me it’s not about measurement but containment. Uh huh. There’s a reason nobody flags that last bit, as in test-trace-and-quarantine. The political difficulty goes up 10x for that. So we pretend the easy part is it.
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There is very little political capacity to do large-scale selective quarantine enforcement in the west. Take your pick: Group quarantine Ankle monitors Trust patriotic self-isolation Each breaks. Ship has sailed anyway I think.
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Next question I’m thinking about. Thought experiment— if the government gave up and said “do whatever, we give up, reopen at will...” What would people and businesses actually do? What is the natural reopening pattern absent rule of law? 🤔
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