Glenn Greenwald has a substack article and a video that has more common sense than anything I've read during the current panic. Indeed, we have been grappling with the question at the Long Hill Institute from day one and have not come up with anything close to the clarity Mr. Greenwald expresses.
For those who do not know who Glenn Greenwald is, he had been a well known columnist at Salon and then at the Guardian. He left to become part of The Intercept as a founder, but departed when censorship questions arose.
Greenwald is well known for his excellent No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,* wherein he chronicled Snowden's flight and exposure of the vast U.S. surveillance state.
Since then, he has been accused of going off the reservation. Glenn had been considered a respected member of team progressive. It seems, however, he went rogue, i.e. he was not in lock step with the left on the post-2016 election controversy. He was in no sense a MAGA guy, but was not on board with the Russia hysteria.
This did not go unnoticed among the elect. A Daily Beast article of June 2, 2021 with the not so subtle title of Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media?has cast him out. Going on Tucker Carlson has got to be a sin.
The Long Hill Institute will leave the ideological battles around the man to others. We intend to discuss an article that is flawless.
On August 25, 2021, Greenwald posted a column with the title, The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates. In all the discussion of the pandemic, there may have been mentions of cost-benefit analysis, but on Long Hill, we remember none as applied to the general policy.
Greenwald begins his screed thus:
"In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits."
Is this true? The author applies a simple but effective analogy.
"The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph. Any of those policies would immediately prevent huge numbers of human beings from dying"
Yup. We could save far more lives by instituting such a regime than all the safety practices we have mandated for Covid.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the auto age arrived before we became safety obsessed. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff discuss the concept of safetyism they developed as it applies to young people in the book The Coddling of the American Mind. In covid, it is out in the general society. The "if it prevents only one death" mantra must be respected.
Now, before you get all woke over this and call your reps and senators because a crash could occur somewhere, there is a reason for countenancing some highway slaughter. It is the aforementioned cost-benefit analysis.
"...we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days). So foundational is the use of this cost-benefit analysis that it is embraced and touted by everyone from right-wing economists to the left-wing European environmental policy group CIVITAS…"
Have the great and good applied this to the Covid debate? In real terms, there has been no debate. Anyone who has suggested an alternative risks being called an anti-vaxxer or toothless hillbilly.
It was pointed out to me that there is a difference in Covid-19 and highway slaughter in that even a freeway pileup that causes many deaths and other casualties ends there while an infectious individual can spread covid to many others who can do the same on and on.
True enough, but even considering that, how long can a society stand the cost of being locked down? Probably not forever and the reality of the necessity of applying cost-benefit analysis will eventually out.
Maybe things are changing.
On August 17, 2021 the Atlantic has published The Coronavirus Is Here Forever. This Is How We Live With It, by staff writer, Sarah Zhang. Though no one has ever suggested total eradication was going to happen as been done with Smallpox, we have heard terms such as flattening the curve and herd immunity could happen.
Then it was on to mask mandates, social distancing and the “game changer” of the vaccine. In the end, learning to live with it, with at least some resignation, has to be countenanced.
Sarah Zhang isn’t suggesting let ‘er rip with a societal group hug leading to the survivors attaining the ability to deal with a somewhat attenuated virus, but the regime of eternal lockdowns is not on either.
Better treatments and vaccines would help and ventilation would make it all easier as the Atlantic article has it. Will it fit in with a cost-benefit equation?
At some point it probably does not matter as the general population will decide when they have had enough.
Up on Long Hill we tend to agree with Glenn that the cost-benefit calculation should have been applied but it is our guess that there was no cost-benefit analysis applied to the automobile age and that it arose ad hoc.
It would have been wonderful if there had been such an analysis of what would be acceptable economically and socially in the pandemic, but that is not how it happens. Instead, the organs of government seemed to make it up as best they could.
It will take some time, but sooner or later some realizations may occur that change our perception of how the pandemic was managed. This does sometimes happen and a truth can become self-evident. After all, other than some die-hard neocons, no one still believes nation building in Afghanistan was a good idea, yet as bad an idea as it was, it was once popular enough that the man who led it won a second term. The faith that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has ceased to exist other than among one or two talking heads.
If one does not absolutely agree with the accepted narrative they are condemned as anti-science. Up on Long Hill, that happens to us a lot. Maybe we’re not that bright, but not having done the hard work of studying science, we must do our best to muddle along. That usually means acceptance of “argument from authority,” and comes down to which expert or school of thought sounds most reasonable (like Colin Powell talking about “yellowcake”)**.
This is a problem for society when we consider the acceptance of the lockdown regime was based on the trust of authoritative pronouncements that all too often changed. Vaccines were rolled out with efficacy not to be challenged and then turned out not to be impervious to variants. The elect displayed little humility in not explaining they might not have gotten it perfectly and we are expected to fall in line with another “jab,” with no guarantee that this will not be a regimen that lasts indefinitely.
The unwashed might be forgiven for asking the experts, do you guys know what you’re doing or are you winging it? Indeed, the term “game changer” needs to be retired.
Is there anything worth hanging one's hat on? Something that could be done that might work, but not overpromise?
Again, your fallible servant claims no special knowledge, but there is something out there that impressed him as the most logical course.
Dr. Michael Mina had an article in Time Magazine back on November 17, 2020. He laid out the value of rapid antigen testing and how it would be efficient and would cost a fraction of anything else we could do.
It made sense and he would be featured elsewhere including on NPR. Officialdom, however, yawned.
The good doctor has since been fighting the good fight and actually making progress as there are places that have taken up the practice, but it should have the imprimatur of official policy.
It was heartening to hear in the president’s dirigiste speech that he supported testing. It would have been better if that was the cornerstone of the policy instead of an appendage, especially as much of his pronunciamento was constitutionally dubious.
It would be good to know who is contagious and who is not, and that is that is what rapid antigen testing works toward.
Since then, Dr. Mina has kept up his efforts in articles and twitter posts. He is in no sense against the vaccines but notes in another Time article:
"The vaccines are here. Why do we still need testing? Testing is our eye on the virus. Without testing, we can’t see where it is or where it is going. As fall and winter set in, outbreaks will again occur, sparked by the unvaccinated. And most people become infectious before they know they are infected."
Eminently reasonable and a point of view that even anti-vaxxers could at the very least concede, one would hope. The vaxxed should jump on that band wagon rather than death shaming the recalcitrant.
Your writer, humble as he might be, loves to pat himself on the back. Up on Long Hill, we have supported testing even before we knew of Dr. Mina.
In August, 2020 issue of the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Magazine, he noted that Taiwan had Covid under control and utilized testing as a big part of the effort. A couple of congressmen and an a Nobel Prize winning economist were pushing it. A nation was groaning under the weight of a plague, but at least some were noticing an important tool.
What Dr. Mina proposed was advocating that valuable tool. It can be implemented just about anywhere, and in schools, should become accepted routine.
Alas, Safetyism reigns supreme.
You can watch Mina’s Youtube video with Lex Fridman, and it should convince you.
Final note: The Hill, yesterday publishedIt's time to rapid home-test every American every day. Though one might be tempted to file it under “A Day Late” We’ll put it in our “Better Late Than Never” digital folder.