Arnold Kling On Naive Realism

 Arnold Kling introduced me to a useful concept in a recent post: naive realism:

[Ross Douthat] is responding to the views of his newspaper’s writers and readers that the United States suffered many more COVID deaths because Donald Trump was President. I think that this view is very widespread and very wrong.

A lot of research suggests that non-pharmaceutical interventions made little or no difference in cross-regional and cross-country comparisons. Statistical comparisons aside, tell me what policies the President could have put in place that would have made a large difference. Show your work, keeping in mind how many deaths seemed to stem from New York subways and nursing homes.

Jeffrey Friedman introduced me to the term naive realism, which is an important concept with a misleading name. I would explain naive realism as follows.

A first-order naive realist believes that he knows enough to solve a problem if he were in charge.

A second-order naive realist admits that he does not know the solution, but he is sure that someone could solve the problem if that person were put in charge.

It seems to me that there are a lot of naive realists about the pandemic.

Multiple times in just the past week, I have heard people criticize Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic by citing the full death toll. (It is all over my Facebook feed, and it always seems to come up in phone calls with my parents.) It's fine to suggest that the death toll is higher than it would be under an optimal policy regime (maybe one that Hilary Clinton would have put in place, if that's what people are suggesting?). Or maybe people are implicitly conceding that, yes, we'd have a comparably large death toll under any regime (my view), but even if the president is only responsible for a small percentage of what happens in the world (also my view), a small percentage of hundreds of thousands of death is still thousands of deaths. That would be perfectly reasonable, too. But it is slightly sloppy to say "Two-hundred thousand people have died!" in the middle of an anti-Trump screed, as if there is any reasonable counterfactual where that number is near zero. 

I second Kling's observation that there seems to be little correlation between policy response and death toll if you look world wide. I also second his observation that there has been a wide range of state and local policy responses. A switch flipped right around March 15th, when the world suddenly decided to stop dismissing the virus and started implementing extreme policy responses. As buffoonish as Trump is, it's hard for me to see him as uniquely responsible for our problems. 

I have my own list of desired policy responses. Call it "naive realism" if you want. Don't get me wrong, I certainly blame Trump for failing to implement these. (Fast track FDA approval for viral tests, mask production, and new treatments; suspend the price controls known as "anti-gouging laws" at least insofar as these affect interstate commerce; set a better example regarding personal safety and hygiene protocols; allow the non-vulnerable to acquire some kind of herd immunity.) All that said, I don't think it's obvious that some counterfactual president would have implemented these, or some other slate of good policy responses that don't occur to me. 

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The exchange between Peter Suderman and Nick Gillespie in this Monday's Reason podcast echoes my own inner dialogue about Trump's responsibility for the pandemic. (It is only an inner dialogue, because TDS has made an outer dialogue on "the performance of the Trump administration" all but impossible.) Suderman is, in my opinion, sloppy about placing too much of the blame on Trump, and Gillespie calls him out for it. I say this all as someone who does not like Trump. It feels awkward to be "defending" a president whose platform and style I completely despise. (Scare quotes because I'm really not defending him, just pushing back against sloppy arguments.) But it's important that we not pretend that our problems will be solved the day Trump leaves office. Misdiagnosing the problem leads to fixating on the wrong solution and can lead to false optimism when that "solution" is implemented. I am seeing a lot of first and second-order naive realism right now. At this point, I'm hoping Trump goes away just so some semblance of rational policy discussion can resume. 

Libertarianism: a Philosophy of Discipline and Self-Control

Libertarians seem to have something of a branding problem. Many people confuse libertarianism with libertinism. The first is a political philosophy that insists on strong justification for any government intervention in our lives. The second is a lifestyle characterized by a total lack of self-control and indulgence of all pleasures. It's easy for someone who isn't thinking very clearly to slip from one to the other. That is, casual observers assume libertarians want drugs and prostitution to be legal because they assume we want to indulge these vices. A well crafted argument in favor of drug legalization can be simply derailed by some moron saying, "Huh huh, you sure do love drugs." (Literally, my first experience with the term "libertarians" was someone saying, "They're like insane Republicans who love drugs!")

Sometimes libertarians play along with this. It's usually humorous, done as an intentional joke. I do it, to. When someone makes a joke at the expense of libertarians, my response is usually, "I laughed so hard, I accidentally blew the rock out of my crack pipe and it scared the hooker!" (Sometimes followed up with, "She dropped the copy of Atlas Shrugged she was holding, which I was paying her to read to me.") There is a Facebook page I follow called Jo Jorgensen's Dank Meme Stash. Many of the posts there have the following theme: some impressive looking piece of military hardware (like a tank-copter) and a caption that says "Daddy Joe and Donald won't let me have one? Can I have one, Mama Jo Jo?" Occasionally this manages to still be funny. But I'm afraid it plays into people's dumb stereotypes about libertarianism. 

There's basically zero chance of uniting libertarians around a brand (we are a fractious bunch), but serious libertarians in the public eye should at least be trying. We need to counter the perception that we think everyone should do whatever they want all the time. There certainly are some libertarians who just don't like following rules, any rules, no matter who promulgates them. This is "libertarianism as a cultural attitude." "Fuck it, I'll do what I want." This is distinct from "libertarianism as a political philosophy." The latter deals solely with what the government should be doing and is mostly silent on what kinds of private institutions people can (or should) form. Libertarianism as a political philosophy says you can form very restrictive, exclusive institutions, perhaps specifically designed to inhibit and constrain your behavior. A neighborhood association restricts who can leave their giant boat or camper parked on the goddamn street (also when they can park their giant obstruction to traffic and visibility), to the benefit of all. A church might place restrictions on your personal behavior, even when you're not attending church. It is a way for like-minded people to congregate, and perhaps a way for people to discipline their own behavior, a pre-commitment device. A martial arts school, like the one that I attend, actually allows us to relax rules that normally apply to people in polite society: I get to assault someone, who is simultaneously trying to assault me. But only under very specific rules and conditions. I do not get to assault those very same people if I see them on the street. A company employs workers and watches them work to monitor their productivity. Workers tolerate this because they wouldn't bother to be productive if nobody were monitoring them. (Under such "zero monitoring" conditions, everyone would slack, and there would be no revenue out of which to pay the workers. An implicit understanding of this dynamic underlies the worker-employer relationship.) People will voluntarily join institutions that discipline their behavior, and libertarianism is a philosophy that says we should have the broadest possible freedom to explore these institutional forms. It's not "Fuck it, I'll do whatever I want." It's more like, "I can form a strict religious commune that harshly disciplines its members and expels the non-compliant ones, and the government shouldn't be allowed to stop me."

In terms of government policy, libertarians are practically the only ones calling for a disciplined vetting of public policy. Laws that limit our personal choices, such as laws against drugs, prostitution, and (at one point) homosexuality, are often called "paternalistic". I think this is a misnomer, because it implies a wise parent setting restrictions on a child's behavior. No, the psychology of "paternalists" is more like the scolding of a sibling by a slightly older sibling. When my 9-year-old scolds my 6-year-old, or when my 6-year-old enforces rules against my 4-year-old, it is not out of altruistic concern for the younger sibling's well-being. I remember being a kid. I remember how awesome it feels to be "morally superior" to someone. Some people carry this attitude into adulthood, and it ends up infecting their politics. It takes real self-control to restrain the urge to "fix" someone else's dumb decisions. It's the paternalists, not the libertarians, who are indulging a childish impulse.  I liken it to someone who lacks the self-control to resist scratching a mosquito bite. There are right-wing puritans, who don't want you to have the kind of drugs or sex you want. There are also left-wing puritans, who would not allow you to make your own decisions regarding pharmaceutical consumption or labor contracts. (It is interesting that both tribes agree that we shouldn't have free choice with respect to pharmacology or association. They only differ slightly on the details.) They are indulging in the childish scolding that a 6-year-old dishes out to a 4-year-old. We should call them out using this language and not let them get away with thinking they are the "adult in the room."

Libertarians are also the only ones calling for any kind of fiscal restraint. Neither party is serious about cutting the size of government, or even about paying or bills for the stuff the government buys. The stereotype is that Republicans run up massive deficits by cutting (or failing to increase) taxes, while Democrats create the need for higher taxes with massive spending programs. All this spending is hidden from the taxpayer. It is financed with borrowing rather than tax increases, which would more quickly alert the citizenship to the real cost of government. On top of that, the true burden of taxation is hidden from the taxpayer via tax withholding. It would be more honest to present the taxpayer with the full bill once a year. ("Tax return" is such a disgusting euphemism for this childish deception.) Governments also love to use pensions and other long-term liabilities to obfuscate the true level of spending from taxpayers. (A pension plan might use an out-of-date life table that overstates mortality, thus understating total liabilities. Or it might make an overly generous assumption about the discount rate, discounting at the market's average rate of return rather than the risk free rate. Obligations like these are eventually owed by the taxpayer, but they are foisted upon them with subterfuge and fraudulent accounting.) The libertarian take on all of this is that we should be much more honest about what we're spending. There should be almost no debt financing, unless it's a true emergency. The taxpayers should be confronted with the true cost of government. Government employees should be given real pay increases, funded by current tax increases, so the public has a chance to say, "No, it's not worth it." It takes real adult-grade discipline to say: 

If I had my druthers, I would love to re-shape the world to match my grand designs. But alas, that would be unduly costly. We'll just have to live with the imperfect world we were given.

Or: 

I think we should spend public money on Program X, because in my own estimation it passes a cost-benefit test. But if taxpayers saw the true cost reflected in their current taxes, they would balk. We need to rule with the consent of the governed, not trick them into doing what we think is best for them. Program X should be scrapped.

Self-discipline means not doing some of the things that you would like to do because of prudent consideration of the costs and consequences. I see almost no sign of this kind of restraint on the current American political stage. The right wing has been taken over by reactionary nationalists. They want to remold the nation to match their vision of "greatness." This is after decades of a right wing populated by "nation builders", who imagined they could re-shape the world with the surgical application of military force. (Much like a child playing with his toy soldiers, not at all like the "mature-adult-in-the-room" image that many chest-thumping militants wish to project.) The left wing has its own unconstrained vision of reality. They imagine they can simply dissolve and re-constitute long standing institutions, as if the application of sheer reason and good intentions would bend reality to their whims. Libertarians should be out in front pointing out the childishness of this naïve utopianism. We're not bong-smoking hippies doing whatever the fuck we want whenever the fuck we want to. We're actually the suit-and-tie-wearing-adult-in-the-room pointing out that we are already living beyond our means. The candy being promised by Uncle Joe has to be paid for, and we are already in serious debt. And contra Uncle Donald, we do have to pay for all the stuff we buy, even if he won't be here when the bills come due. Everything has a cost. Mama Jo Jo needs to be the voice of restraint on an undisciplined political stage. Other libertarians need to put on their serious face once in a while and swat away the ridiculous sneer that we're a bunch of self-indulgent libertines. Sometimes that means reminding other libertarians that they are in fact bound by certain rules, and would be so bound under any just system of government. (Including a system of no government; you are still bound by the rules of private institutions in such a world.) Once in a while, Mama Jojo needs to say,

No, you can't have a tank-copter, because it would make your property uninsurable. It would make you uninsurable! The sheer scale of the liability create by private ownership of military-grade firepower makes it cost-prohibitive, government or no government, 2nd Amendment or no 2nd Amendment. 

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I wanted to say something about mask-wearing, more specifically the resistance to it, but it didn't quite fit into the flow of the post above. There is nothing libertarian about being mask non-compliant. If a private residence or business has a rule that insists on mask-wearing, you should agree to their rules prior to entering. Respect for private property is a very libertarian idea, at a basic level. Mask non-compliance may seem "libertarian" in a crude "fuck-it-I'll-do-what-I-want" sense, but by this standard so is theft. Protesting a government mandate to wear masks is a very different story. 

I also wanted to say something about religious practices and codes of behavior. Do the most successful cults and communes say "Come on in and do whatever the fuck you like!"? No, they impose some sort of discipline on their members, based on a set of shared values. Some of this is instrumental, like control of one's alcohol consumption for the sake of healthy community life. But some of it is arbitrary. It's discipline for the sake of discipline, which is ultimately for the sake of community building. Physically or emotionally punishing ordeals create a shared experience, which binds community members together. (Two books I've recently read, Influence by Cialdini and The Mystery of the Kibbutz by Abramitzky, have long passages about the importance of initiation rites.) Not that anyone is trying to set up a libertarian commune, and we're too fractious a bunch to form much of a cult. But clearly "Join us and you can do whatever you want" is not a compelling message. It's not going to draw people in. 

Thomas Sowell on Disarming Marines Holding Loaded Pistols

 From Thomas Sowell's autobiography A Personal Odyssey. It is well worth reading in full.

Safety is much more a problem on a pistol range than on a rifle range, simply because it is so much easier to accidentally point a loaded pistol at someone. While we stressed safety to everyone, we learned from experience that there were great differences in the extent to which safety rules were observed. Combat veterans were the safest shooters. They needed no reminder that firearms were dangerous. Next in safety were Marines from units trained for combat, like the Second Marine Division. When you got to people who had civilian-like jobs, things got lax and dangerous if you didn’t stay on top of them. Then when you had shooters who were in fact civilians – reservists - things got dicey, as you would find them casually pointing the pistol in all directions, gesturing with it, and in general being a menace. More than once, I had to take a loaded .45 from some reservist’s hands – a somewhat delicate operation-because he was paying no attention at all to where he was pointing it.

Emphasis mine. I wonder what he actually did. I can picture him gently reaching for the gun with outstretched arms and splayed fingers and plucking the gun from a confused reservists' hands. I can also picture him doing a krav maga style gun disarm, trapping the side of the gun against his body and forcefully twisting it out of the reservist's hands. Presumably it was not the latter, as this would seem to have a high chance of spooking the trainee and making him pull the trigger. 

The Path To Herd Immunity

 The profile of Covid-19's mortality by age suggests an obvious strategy for achieving herd immunity: let the relatively young and invulnerable mix freely, isolate and protect the vulnerable. Obviously I'm not the first person to say this. I am very confused as to why such a strategy hasn't been tried. 

I am a libertarian, and I don't particularly like the government telling people either that they must or must not commingle. Any version of "You must return your children to public school" or "You must report to your college campus" completely creeps me out. People who aren't comfortable with exposing themselves to the virus should be free to arrange their lives so they aren't exposed. (In fact, people who don't want to send their children to public school shouldn't have to, ever, under any conditions.) Some children or parents of children are vulnerable. They may be immune-compromised or have other risk factors. It certainly makes sense that they should be able to keep their households out of any herd immunity strategy that involves a controlled spread of the virus. But I also think people shouldn't require a doctor's note to make these decisions about arranging their lives. Maybe someone has no risk factors whatsoever. The other risks they assume in the normal course of their daily lives might be orders of magnitude larger than their mortality risk from Covid-19. They should be able to exclude themselves and their children from any government plan, for whatever reason or for no reason at all. 

With all that said, infectious disease control is a legitimate role for government. It is a classic externality problem. Your individual efforts to stem the spread are a public good. The benefits are non-rivalrous (everyone gets them; someone's benefiting doesn't preclude someone else's benefiting from the same quantity of spread-mitigation). They are non-excludable (you cannot prevent someone from benefiting from your efforts of spread-mitigation, hoping perhaps to extract a fee from them). I'm an anarcho-capitalist (at least on even days), and even I have to admit that there is a compelling reason to have government do something in this space. (Assuming your particular government can do so competently...admittedly that qualifier is often not satisfied.). Governments should not have the power to close down businesses, but they should be collecting information, issuing guidance and making decisions about how and when to open schools and other institutions that it directly controls. (If a purer anarchocapitalist wants to get mad at me for saying this, fine. But given where we are today, the government "public health" institutions that currently exist are the only game in town. I'm speaking to what they should do assuming they will continue to exist, which they certainly will.)

From the paper linked to above:

The estimated IFR is close to zero for children and younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching 0.4% at age 55, 1.3% at age 65, 4.5% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. We find that differences in the age structure of the population and the age-specific prevalence of COVID-19 explain 90% of the geographical variation in population IFR. Consequently, protecting vulnerable age groups could substantially reduce the incidence of mortality.

That paper was apparently posted in late August, but some version of this was known since March, when the lockdowns began. The elderly are vulnerable, and "elderly" is really a proxy for "has underlying conditions." (As in, some elderly people with good lung capacity are not really at risk, just as some young people with respiratory issues are at elevated risk.) There is no excuse for not using this information to guide public policy. The risk to children and young adults is minuscule, orders of magnitude smaller than other risks that they assume (or that their parents subject them to, presumably with their best interests in mind). If we had simply protected the vulnerable populations but allowed the virus to spread among the young and healthy, we'd have some degree of herd immunity by now. We'd have these epidemiological fire-breaks in our public schools and universities. The virus might get in, but it would find few new hosts and ultimately have nowhere to go. 

I understand why people don't like this strategy. The objection is usually some version of, "If young people get the virus, they will spread it to vulnerable people." It's hard for me to put into words just how much I have lost patience with this line of argument. It never made much sense. First off, we need to treat "tolerance of lockdown policy" as a depletable resource. (Robin Hanson says it well in this post. Hanson also has some posts from early March arguing, and backed with numerical simulations, that it makes sense to expose the non-vulnerable.) People eventually tire of living like prisoners, being shut-ins, being denied the services they're used to for arbitrary reasons. They begin to spontaneously disobey the law, then eventually they demand policy changes for a return to normality. Bearing this point in mind, I think we have actually wasted a tremendous amount of time. From mid-March through May, I think most people were extremely diligent about staying isolated. It's only since then that workers started returning to offices, senior citizens started venturing out more, etc. My in-laws spent two months inside their house, not even venturing out for a walk. My wife brought them groceries. That was the time to let our small children return to school. So what if there was an outbreak of Covid-19 in schools and universities? The virus would have spread within a resilient population while the vulnerable were being fully isolated from them. (I wonder how many college students were sent home to live with their elderly parents, or non-elderly parents who comingle with the elderly grandparents. College dorms should have stayed open to give these kids an option to isolate themselves from the vulnerable, but that was botched.) There is even an argument for not closing down the school and not being overly strict about mask-wearing and temperature-checking. (As in, are we going for herd immunity or aren't we?) The vulnerable were being isolated and were, for the time, tolerating it. At this point, my in-laws are making no effort to keep their distance from their grandchildren. People are slipping out of their habits of scrupulous caution, even the ones who are very adamant about lockdowns and mask-compliance. Sheer exhaustion is setting in. 

(Call this anecdotal, but I saw large numbers of graduations parties in late May and early June. Unmasked young adults were comingling, eating together, conversing, and presumably doing other things young people do together. One night I could hear high schoolers partying in a nearby back yard. This matches basically what I've heard from parents with teenage children and news stories of Covid outbreaks spawned by wild parties. The parties are happening. We need to construct public health policy assuming that there will be non-compliance. Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, we implement public health policy with the public we have, not the public we'd like to have. And, once again, it's really not a big deal if these young people themselves get sick, unless of course they spread it to the vulnerable.)

We may have missed the best opportunity to go for herd immunity, but it's still an option. (In my opinion, the best option.) It may require asking the vulnerable to return to levels of isolation and precaution they were experiencing in March through May. 

Someone could dissuade me of the "herd immunity" strategy being a good idea. But it would take some kind of quantitative argument. Perhaps someone could model the "mixing" of vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations and demonstrate clearly that, under reasonable assumptions, there's too much leakage? (I believe this Twitter thread is trying to quantify the leakage issue, so is this one.) Even then, someone would have to articulate a clear path out of this mess. They'd have to answer philosophical questions about what the non-vulnerable's duty is to the vulnerable. What do the vulnerable even want (as in, are they even asking their children and grandchildren to halt their lives)? And what's the point of preserving a virus-free "commons" that nobody is supposed to be using? Even if it doesn't confer significant herd immunity, unleashing the young and relatively healthy is the right thing to do for these other reasons. Focusing mitigation efforts specifically on the vulnerable is rational public policy. You want to allocate resources and efforts to where they're doing the most good. The flip-side of that is that we don't want to incur excessive costs "protecting" people who aren't really threatened. 

There are other objections to a "protect the vulnerable, unleash everyone else" strategy. To many people, I'm sure it sounds like "Let's intentionally subject people to viral infection." But this is the wrong framing. We're talking about allowing people to return to their normal lives, where the virus will be one of many risks they encounter. If that's "intentionally infecting people with the virus", then allowing people to drive is "intentionally subjecting people to fatal traffic accidents." (More to the point, allowing 16-year-olds to drive, knowing they must start learning somewhere, is "intentionally subjecting children to fatal traffic accidents." I have this same "We need to start somewhere" reaction towards people who want us to stay locked in forever.) This isn't just an objection to going for herd immunity, it's an objection to letting anyone take any risks for any reason. It's not serious. There really is an important moral difference between an act of commission and an act of omission. 

Another possible objection is that we shouldn't even subject children to the risk of the coronavirus. (I'm not sure anyone is actually saying this, but it seems to be implicit in some of the arguments I have heard with respect to lockdown policy.) I think this is kind of silly, because we subject children to much larger risks all the time, usually without even thinking about it. They face mortality risks from auto accidents, swimming pools, and trampolines. Put in it's proper context, the risk they face from the coronavirus is a rounding error. It is perfectly appropriate that we are inured to certain background risks, which we have implicitly or explicitly chosen to accept as a fact of life. 

Yet another objection is that we can simply sit tight and wait for a vaccine. Why bother with the carnage of hard-to-control viral spread when a vaccine will ultimately save us? I personally don't think this is reasonable. A working vaccine is still months out by almost any sensible projection. And who knows how effective it will be? A vaccine is a means of generating herd immunity based on extremely mild to asymptomatic infections. Same with "protect the vulnerable, unleash everyone else." Some small number of young people would get extremely ill and die under an "unleash the young" policy, but then again any vaccine could subject recipients to similar risks. (When you get a vaccine, there is usually a liability waiver listing several warnings about who should and shouldn't get it. There's always the chance that someone misjudges which category they're in, or that the vaccine has unknown defects. See the CDC's list of real and imagined vaccine safety concerns.) I also have this "boiling the frog" reaction to the notion of waiting for a vaccine. It might seem like one is in reach at this point, but if you'd told people in March to "live like this until a vaccine comes out in 2021" they would have rightly revolted. 

(Somehow variolation and isolation is off the table? Again, here is Robin Hanson, who was right about many things very early on. Is that another example of people getting squeamish about "intentionally" doing something that's basically inevitable anyway? As if controlling who gets the virus and when is somehow worse than the "non-deliberate" alternative that kills a comparable or larger number of people?)

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I know that "herd immunity" doesn't actually mean what it sounds like. It doesn't mean the virus can't infect anyone. It basically means there are enough immune people in the population that the virus stops spreading at an exponential rate. It can still be spreading at a linear rate. I am using the term loosely in this post to mean "some kind of benefit is conferred by having large numbers of immune individuals." I am not referring to a specific phase transition that happens in epidemiological models when exactly 71.5% of the population has immunity. As many commentators have pointed out, this is a squishy concept anyway. It can exist in some  places but not in others, and it is dependent on behavioral responses to the virus, it's not a property of the virus in and of itself. I don't particularly care what exact threshold we need to reach for herd immunity. Quite simply, more immunity is better than less immunity, particularly when it's simply a by-product of doing the right thing (unleashing the young). 

I am seeing atrociously bad faith treatment of the herd immunity concept in the media. See this piece in The Atlantic (or listen to the associated episode on the Social Distance podcast). There is no mention of the "protect the vulnerable" part of the plan, which is crucial. I follow a few lockdown skeptics in my podcast and blog feeds, and they are all constantly criticizing our inability to protect nursing homes from outbreaks. Practically nobody (short of out-and-out virus deniers) is advocating a "let 'er rip" or "yank off the band aid" approach, in which no mitigation measures whatsoever are taken. The attempt to associate a herd immunity strategy with "the right wing" and to smear Scott Atlas are pretty clear evidence of the Atlantic piece's agenda. I may do a longer post dealing specifically with this piece. It was near the top of my Google search, and it seems pretty typical of the language I'm hearing on this topic. So it presents a good foil.