Consider this speculative curve, capturing that fear... that past a point the economic breakdown is apocalyptic and irrecoverablepic.twitter.com/BJry7b7uFc
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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.
I too feel this frustration, but the US and UK are NOT Myanmar or Vietnam. And the reason they have the Cala ity to do vaccine research etc to really solve this is also the reason they can’t do quarantine like authoritarian states can https://twitter.com/comparativist/status/1256085315216764928?s=21 …https://twitter.com/Comparativist/status/1256085315216764928 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did a thread about this. We’ll have it eventually but not soon enough for this time.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249380932152258560?s=21 …
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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