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TS Eliot believed that “humanity cannot bear much reality”; Jack Nicholson told us that “we can’t handle the truth.” Neither the poet nor the actor would have had the coronavirus in mind, but I suspect that their comments, in the current epidemiological landscape, would have been the same.
His words have general applicability and have stood the test of time.
No politician is capable of telling the truth, at least the whole truth. The speech that I suspect one or two of them would like to make is as follows:
Uncertainty
“The coronavirus presents us with unprecedented complexity and uncertainty (at least in modern times). We don’t know much, but we are learning all the time. There is no such thing as’ science ‘, but there is science’.
Our goal is to suppress / mitigate / eliminate (remove as appropriate) the virus, but we are not sure how. As we get more data, hopefully we’ll learn enough. As the evidence comes in, we will make decisions accordingly.
We will share that data with you in conjunction with the decision-making processes that we use. In particular, we will publish each of the epidemiological models that we deploy, including all their updates. Our decisions will be as clear as the reasons why we make them.
Sometimes those decisions will be different, perhaps very different, from what we made the day before.
We call that learning by doing. Our opponents will yell ‘U-turn’, but we trust the general public to understand that this is not politics but decision-making under incredible uncertainty.
Each of us are decision makers. We will establish public policy, rules, and you will behave accordingly. We will also make non-binding recommendations that we hope make sense to you.
Each of you will be trusted to make your own risk-based assessments of how best to behave, given all the uncertainties and complexities. We live in a stochastic, non-deterministic world. That’s the jargon for saying the truth is there, but it may never be fully known, and in any case, it is unlikely to be consistent.
Decision
Every decision we make, not just our Covid choices, all day, every day, involves risk. We implicitly or explicitly make risk-based decisions every minute of our lives. Every decision we make affects another person, often trivially, sometimes fatally.
Our goal today is to make our behavioral choices around the coronavirus as explicit and fully informed as possible. Just as we demand that they drive on the left or not hit each other in the face, we also have non-binding social norms around respect and courtesy. Covid’s safe behaviors are similar – we set the laws and we also make strong suggestions about the rules. Everything as evidence-based as possible.
This approach has the virtues of honesty, clarity, simplicity, and embodies as much truth as the data allows. ‘
Feelings
Clearly, few governments around the world share the sentiments behind these thoughts or, if they do, feel capable of sharing them with us.
Most electorates are treated for fungus. Politicians waver on the basic objective and then change policies based on who knows what.
Boris Johnson in the UK is perhaps the best example of this, caught between scientists advocating closures and increasingly stringent types of finance, like his Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants to put the economy first.
Johnson’s decisions seem to depend on the tribe he most recently spoke to. The two “down and up” tribes have a third tribe that shoots slings and arrows at them: the economics profession can’t decide whether to close or not to open is a false dichotomy.
Our inability to handle complexity and probabilistic outcomes is painfully evident. We are sustained by myth and superstition instead of facing disordered reality.
We prefer leaders who profess, through bragging and bragging, certainty. Our culture is dominated by bosses, by nations and companies, who always speak in terms of binary possibility: I’m right, you’re wrong. In such a world, it is essential never to explain or apologize.
In this binary world, everything is political, so the economy becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters is being right, even when you are obviously wrong.
Predictions
So when Trump supporters are presented with evidence that they are demonstrably worse off, they couldn’t help it.
And when Brexit supporters see all the ‘project fear’ predictions come true without any of the promised sunny highlands, they all say out loud, ‘I don’t care.’
David Frum, a prominent and unusual (right-wing) critic of Donald Trump, describes modern America in terms of the freedom of ‘idiots to be idiots’.
When he first coined this aphorism, I thought about it a bit harshly: Trump as a ‘jerk liberation movement leader’ giving people permission to behave like jerks without shame or apology.
I preferred to think of both Trump and Brexit in narrow economic terms, the justified rage of those left behind (but misdiagnosed as they solve their real problems).
Our collective response to the coronavirus has led me to think that Frum was right, not just about Trump but in the broader context.
Maybe we’re all idiots now, at least in the sense that both Eliot and Nicholson suggested. Not only are we not trusted with the truth, we seem to not want it.
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