The goods of politics: Their fate in the modern world

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

Published in and edited form in The Conversation.

Martin Wolf has a crisp face-to-camera opinion piece in which he points out that populism in government hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe from COVID. Thus in the Anglosphere, Donald’s and Boris’s Governments – have been much more chaotic in tackling COVID than others – such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia (at least till now). Meanwhile populist governments such as those of Hungary have also done relatively well. 

“So, the really interesting question” Wolf suggests “turns out to be ‘is a government actually interested in governing?’. As he points out Trump and Bolsonaro in particular are “basically interested in politics as performance”. 

They don’t care about government but they don’t really understand what Government is for and they’re indifferent to it. In some ways and in some cases, they’re actually trying to dismantle the state. It’s pretty obvious if that’s what you want to do, you really can’t manage a disease very well. But there are other autocratic and indeed populist politicians who understand that ultimately their claim on power depends on being reasonably effective in dealing with a very serious disease of this kind. … It’s become more likely that the sort of populists who just don’t care about government are going to be disposed of. But, what will replace them is not necessarily a more effective democratic government, it could be just a much more effective dictator actually wants to deliver government that people care about. And that’s what Hungary has shown and, in a very different way, Poland has shown.

I think we can apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s concepts of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ goods to place Wolf’s distinction in a wider context. He explains them with an example in which a child is taught to play chess and rewarded with candy if she wins. The skills required for excellence in chess are ‘internal goods’. They include spatial vision, computational accuracy and competitive intensity. Those goods are ‘internal’ because they emerge organically from the activity. One’s engagement with them creates the circumstances in which the virtues are discovered and pursued. To obtain the internal goods one must accept the reality of the world beyond one’s subjective desires, and the need to submit oneself both to this reality and to the greater mastery of others within the tradition of the practice.

Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Political theory, Politics - international, Politics - national, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

The gathering Covistance, its promise and its main enemies

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Paul Frijters

Those who already in March foretold the folly of lockdowns and social distancing did not dream we’d still be in the same place after 7 months. Only slowly has it dawned that the panic would become an enduring business model. For a long time, we believed sanity would soon prevail and all we had to do was argue the case and let the prophesised damage speak for itself.

Yet there now is an emerging Covistance: a resistance to the covid-mania and its business model. It’s main message is that the vast majority of the population should immediately return to normal life and enjoy themselves. Throughout the world you see critical civic society groups emerging that share this message, involving medics, lawyers, economists, journalists, businesses, and the general public. In Australia, that Covistance is relatively high-profile with particular television networks, former PMs, and newspapers openly resisting the covid-mania. Brave insiders like Sanjeev Sabhlok have shown zivilcourage. The same is true in the UK, the US, Germany, France, Spain, and many other places. But not everywhere. In consensus countries like the Netherlands and New Zealand, for instance, the Covistance is low-profile with only a few doctors, lawyers, and the odd economist popping their heads above the parapet.

In an intellectual sense, forgive me for saying so, the Covistance won the argument a long time ago. I don’t say this because some 500,000 people and 20,000 scientists signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), or because the experience of Sweden really does show that you dont get Armageddon if the population behaves normally. I also don’t say this because the WHO’s special envoy on Covid implicitly agreed lockdowns were a bad mistake and that the WHO’s own modellers think the virus is no more harmful than a nasty seasonal flu after all, which it admitted when it let slip it thought 10% of the world was infected already (implying an IFR of 0.13%). Nor do I say this because the covid-mania policy objectives keeps changing radically from “delay infections” to “eradicate the virus” to “the miracle vaccine is coming”. I don’t even say this because the Covistance is basically advocating a return to the scientific consensus of before the covid-mania of march 2020 and thus has scientific gravity on its side.

I say the intellectual fight is long-won by the Covistance because the actions of both governments and populations reveal them to secretly agree. Continue reading →

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Cultural Critique, Dance, Death and taxes, Democracy, Geeky Musings, Health, History, Humour, Politics - national, Science | 21 Comments

Playacting government: Victoria’s COVID response

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

Dan Andrews said that his ‘Road Map’ for easing the lockdown is not a doctoral thesis – a proposition that’s hard to argue with. Further propositions will be offered at subsequent press conferences.

Life in the West is increasingly reminding me of the old Soviet joke. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”.

 

Herewith an email I received this morning.

Nick I am going troppo about the Vic policy response

– still denying aerosol transmission and its implications
– still rationing N95 masks which is contributing to these hospital outbreaks
– still haven’t got fit testing mobilised and its roll out scope is limited to covid interacting HCWs

We are counting the costs of pennies in the PPE/health care precautionary response while blithely managing the results via lock downs at the cost of billions.

This fit testing thing. I just booked to get fit tested in November with a private PPE company – they were available for me to book any day of the month.

How is that possible!? How have they and all their competitors not been effectively nationalised – every fit test machine, every fit test technician, mobilised to deploy to hospitals, GP clinics, aged care homes?

It is a similar story on testing. In Melbourne we are just now trialling the remarkable innovation of “third ring” testing. In Qingdao, the Chinese government’s response to a small outbreak is reportedly to test all nine million residents.

Why – in OCTOBER – has the government not said to every leader of every health function in the state: you have no budget constraints. Buy any mask you need at any price. Test anyone you need at any price. There is no cost you can incur that is not worth it if it means even one day sooner out of lock down.

This response is not just incompetent, it’s insane somehow – deeply dissociative.

And my own retweet from yesterday

Posted in Economics and public policy, Ethics, Health, Innovation, Politics - national | 2 Comments

The Great Barrington Declaration?

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Paul Frijters

A group of senior medical scientists have gotten together to pen an open petition to governments and society, calling for a herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Signatories already include over 3000 “Medical & Public Health Scientists”, 4000 “Medical Practitioners”, and 60,000 others not in those categories. That’s pretty good in these times of strong adverse media headwinds.

As I too have been here on Troppo, the organisers of that petition are deeply worried about the damage that the lockdowns and other anti-social measures are doing to children, students, the poor, the developing world, the elderly, and everyone else. Their key quotes on policy are

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

where I want to heartily cheer the phrase “most compassionate approach”. It is exactly that. This approach means

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

which is pretty much what many Australian residents called for in our June letter to governments. There are small things I do not agree with in the letter, but on the general message I am in agreement so have signed it. The strong should accept the burden of gaining high degrees of immunity so that the vulnerable run less risk when leading a normal life. We should indeed encourage and celebrate high covid infection rates among the young and healthy.

Do sign the petition to show your support.

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Health, History, Life, Medical, Science, Society | 61 Comments

Milton Friedman

Posted on October 3, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

I have been reading The Great Persuasion Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin (ostensibly in order to write an article on Michael Polanyi) and was taken with this Chapter on Milton Friedman.

I hadn’t really crystalised for myself until the chapter pointed it out Friedman’s revolutionary modus operandi. Namely:

  • his preference for arguing about means and not ends,
  • his desire for persuasive engagement with those who disagreed with him and
  • the way this framed disagreement productively
  • the way this focused his energies on what I’ve called ‘policy hacks’.

I think these are very good things and discover that I’ve been channelling him – and that, though it’s not canvassed in the chapter, Keynes is similar with all his ‘plans’ for this and that – though Keynes’s plans were typically plans for the economy as a whole, and not the recipe book of ideas like the purchaser/provider split that I suspect began as debating points with Friedman.

We could do with more of this on the left.

He really was the economist as engineer rather than scientist in the sense that Herbert Simon spoke of the sciences as being about knowing the world and the professions as being about designing a better world. The chapter also makes clear how untutored and uninterested Friedman was in methodology or philosophy. In this he wouldn’t be the first person to have had a big impact on the methodology of a subject without having much idea of what he was talking about.

Anyway, regarding the four points above, Friedman gave himself an unfair advantage which was:

  • the extreme simplicity, not to say simple-mindedness of his basic view of how the world did and should work which, as the chapter makes clear, took wing as he progressed through his life. Not believing in estate taxes or anti-discrimination law was pretty much the low point. There was also South Africa and Chile. But then he did think of his greatest achievement as getting rid of conscription. So it takes all sorts.

The first four points offered nifty rhetoric and recipes for targeted change for all seasons. And the final point attached it all to a radically cut down toy model not just of the economy but of the whole social world. This was a world in which capitalism, like democracy, is better than all the alternatives tried and therefore this creates a presumption in its favour – for schools, healthcare, inheritances and monopolies – right up to but not including the point at which the case becomes absurd. It was a very effective bit of performance art. Milton might not have been able to charm the birds from the trees, but, judging from the way things are travelling today, he successfully charmed the devil out of his lair.

Posted in Best From Elsewhere, Economics and public policy, History | 3 Comments

Let’s not waste another crisis

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

How do you do a graphic for a post-COVID world?
Well I guess you have an office with everyone running around with Groucho glasses facemasks on.

The Mandarin asked me to pontificate about the budget – along with some other ‘brains trusters’. I got a bit carried away with myself and wrote an op ed length piece. It’s not really about the budget as it’s likely to be, but about some larger questions about what fiscal policy should look like in a post-COVID world.

I was very impressed with the Government’s early handling of the economics of the COVID crisis right down to the Prime Minister explaining that, consistently with the nation’s unique welfare system, governments owe the same level of emergency financial support to every Australian, and not, as was common in other countries, some payment in proportion to their existing income.

It’s not always the case of course, but it is more often than we appreciate that the generous course is also the most prudent. That’s particularly true when economies are struggling. It was true of the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s which involved the US effectively gifting its recently defeated enemy, Germany around 2% of the US GDP. If the West had done the same with Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, how much healthier, happier and safer might our world be today?

The risk now is that governments turn towards austerity before we return to full employment. This happened with a vengeance in the northern hemisphere after the GFC with disastrous consequences both economic and political.

But it also happened here. The RBA consistently dragged the chain on returning vigorously to full employment even to the point of missing its inflation targets. And in that context, moving to balance the budget did more harm than good, helping to keep hundreds of thousands more Australians unemployed and underemployed than would have occurred otherwise.

We should learn our lesson and this time macro policy should err on the side of doing too much, not too little. In fact, in the spirit of not wasting a crisis we could initiate some really big reforms. Each would have their opponents, but each would be much easier than tax reform or tariff reform was. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics and public policy | 18 Comments

What do excess death graphs tell us?

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Paul Frijters

Have a look at the graph below which summarises (excess) deaths per week in 24 European regions, roughly the EU, over the last few years. Note how the vertical axis only starts at 40,000 and that hence the fluctuations relative to baseline are smaller than they seem here.

The interesting bit is of course the experience in 2020. In April I was skeptical of the argument that the excess deaths (the deaths above the “normal range” band) had to be covid-deaths, rather than a mix of covid-deaths and neglect deaths brought on by policies. Yet, around June the evolution of this graph convinced me that the big spike had to be almost exclusively covid. This is because the death rates before (in February) were at the average of a particular prior number of years (the blue line), and the death rates afterwards (June) were again at that historical average. The main point is that if there were a lot of neglect deaths, there would have been no return to the historical average: the line would have remained above that historical average. So the big spike, which is about 160,000 deaths, or 3 weeks of “normal deaths”, is surely covid.

The lack of negative excess deaths also speaks against the idea that these excess covid-deaths were mainly people who would have died within a few months anyway. If that were true, the line should have gone below the historical average, but instead it was exactly on it. You dont see negative excess deaths anywhere in these 24 countries, perhaps marginally in France.

Associated with this is that the 160,000 excess peak is very close to the claimed number by authorities of the covid deaths in those countries: if you add the claimed covid-death numbers from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, and the others that make up the 24 in the graph above up to the date of the end of the spike, you also get to about 160,000. That validates both these numbers: the reported covid-deaths and the excess deaths as a measure of covid deaths. It is too much coincidence that these numbers should line up so well. So whilst this or that country might exaggerate or under-report their covid-death statistics for some reason, on average these countries are reporting their covid deaths rather honestly. There is no major group of deaths hidden or manufactured in the covid statistics of these countries. Not yet at least. Continue reading →

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Health, Science | 60 Comments