Who Gets To Say “I told you so” About the Recent Surge in Covid?

I'm a little confused by the all the "I told you so" that I'm seeing. Clearly coronavirus cases and deaths have been increasing. Here are screenshots of cases and deaths that I just pulled today from this site. 

Who exactly gets to say, "See? I told you this would happen!" 

There are three basic categories of commentators on the coronavirus (three that I see anyway). One includes silly conspiracy theorists who don't think the coronavirus is real, or who think that the risks are being exaggerated in an explicit plot to control the population. They imagine politicians literally tenting their fingers and smirking about this power-grab. They imagine that Bill Gates is licking his lips over the prospect of injecting some kind of mind-control device via the mass vaccination program. To the extent that these people denied that the coronavirus was real or that it was a big deal, you could certainly tell them "I told you so". (Though they would probably respond by denying the truth of official death statistics, with the "public health" establishment just being a propaganda arm. My view is that public health statistics are often wrong, but not because of some kind of explicit conspiracy.) I mention the conspiracy theorists for the sake of completeness, but I will ignore them for the rest of this post.

Among more moderate views, there are virus "optimists" and "pessimists" (my terms). "Optimists" think that the virus is not such a big deal for young and healthy people, given the very low risk of death or serious complications. Broadly speaking, they are skeptical of government lockdowns and school closures. They think that the vast majority of us can go about our lives, so long as we protect the vulnerable. They see the risks of the coronavirus as comparable to other risks that are simply part of the ecosystem. They basically have signed on to the Great Barrington Declaration: costs of lockdowns and isolation are high and the benefits are small. The young and healthy should get through their bout with the coronavirus while the elderly and vulnerable are still isolating. Herd immunity through infection of the healthy is a viable option. I count myself in the "optimist" group. 

The pessimists are people who, broadly speaking, think everyone should be very worried about getting the coronavirus. Extreme caution is warranted by everyone in society. Broadly speaking they favor lockdowns, either self-imposed or government-imposed. (I think the word has gotten out that viral spread in schools is negligible, because I don't hear this crowd insisting on keeping the schools closed. Not anymore, anyway.) Here, I will fail an ideological Turing test, because I don't understand the pessimism. Either (1) they think the (quantitatively very low) risks to healthy people are a big deal, or (2) they think it's not possible to isolate this mass of healthy human spreaders from the vulnerable, or (3) they think there are unknown long-term health consequences of the coronavirus that we should take very seriously. (I regard (1) as unserious, because it's innumerate or irrational, considering that other background risks we find acceptable are much larger. I regard (2) as superficially plausible, but ultimately misguided. Shouldn't we build up herd immunity in a population that can "take it"? Aren't the vulnerable maximally "locked-down" at this point? I regard (3) as a valid concern that gets converted into Pascal's Mugging by wild speculation. It's something to monitor, for sure, but we shouldn't be up-ending society to hedge against this risk, which is present for almost everything*.) 

I think the pessimists were in favor of very extreme lockdowns and isolation at the very beginning, say in early to mid-March. The initial rationale was to flatten the curve, but the flattened curve was understood to have the same number of infections as the un-flattened curve. Once lockdowns were in place, the rationale changed to "completely squash the virus." The optimists were saying, "There is a scarce resource here." People's patience with isolation will eventually be spent, and they will emerge from their hiding places. We're merely delaying the curve, and we're doing so at very high cost. (Robin Hanson puts it well in this post from mid-March.) If you fail to utterly eliminate the virus via lockdowns (a goal whose impossibility was obvious by some time in March or April), then it will simply come roaring back once people emerge from lockdown and start skimping on hygiene and safety protocols. 

I get the sense that pessimists are saying, "See! The virus is surging again. There was no herd immunity. So checkmate, Great Barrington signers!" (I'm thinking of Tyler Cowen here. His commentary on the FDA's foot-dragging has been excellent, but his bashing of the Great Barrington crowd has been atrocious.) The optimists could rightly respond, "We told you that this thing would surge again. We told you the area under the curves was the same, and that you were just delaying the inevitable. So here it is, come roaring back." 

The pessimists are right to say "I told you so" to anyone who thought we'd already fully acquired herd immunity, although I'm not sure anyone on the optimist side was claiming that with any confidence. Then again, the surge has been smaller in places that were hard-hit in early March, so population-level immunity is having some effect. Look at the experience of New York and New Jersey. Governments can try to "flatten" all they like, but there's something to this idea that the area under the curve doesn't change. It just pushes the inevitable infections into the future. On this point, the optimists were right to say "I told you so." I think the experience in Sweden was legitimately a surprise to the optimists (note that deaths in Sweden are once again trending downward). 

Doesn't the vaccine change the equation here? As in, those viral infections were not in fact inevitable. Had we simply gotten the vaccine a month or two earlier, a very large number of infections to date would have been avoided. There is something to this, but it's impossible to make this argument without having known ex ante when the vaccines would be ready. In fact, I think the vaccine argument actually cuts both ways. We saw a huge resurgence of the virus before the vaccine came to save the day. Broadly speaking, pessimists were saying we should endure extreme isolation until a vaccine was ready, and optimists were saying that we can't count on the timing of the vaccine, which may take years or may in fact never come. It looks like two or three different vaccines are ready to deploy, and surely they will ensure that some people can avoid infection. It will truly reduce the area under the curve rather than simply shifting the curve into the future. But it's ambiguous who gets to say "I told you so" on this one. There are perfectly plausible counterfactuals in which the vaccine was ready months earlier; there are other perfectly plausible counterfactuals in which an effective vaccine was never developed. We will know in a few months how this has in fact played out, but that will be an ex post story. It could be that the virus starts to subside before an appreciable number of people have gotten the vaccine (optimists could then say, "I told you so."), or it could persist until vaccination is widespread (pessimists: "I told you so!"). We'll see. Ex ante, it seems unreasonable to tell young people to put their lives on hold for nine months until a vaccine comes along.

I wish we knew more about why cases and deaths started climbing when they did. The rise doesn't seem to correlate with any obvious policy change or behavioral change. Despite the impulse of some scolds to wag a finger at families celebrating Thanksgiving, it's not obvious (to me anyway, from a glance at the data) that there's a change in the trendline after the 26th. It's possible that most interventions just aren't doing much. That is, no business closures or mandates within the acceptable range (i.e. that state or local governments could actually get away with) have any appreciable effect on the spread of the virus. Indeed, if states that took more extreme measures had any effect on the virus, it's hard to see it in the data. There's a kind of "policy invariance" going on here. The same could be true of personal hygiene policies. Maybe that once-a-week venture to the grocery store is just enough exposure. Maybe it aerosolizes easily, such that masks are only marginally effective and it spreads via HVAC systems in large buildings. Maybe the virus has sufficient foothold to spread uncontrollably, and nothing short of total isolation would stop it. Maybe the virus has some kind of seasonality, like other respiratory viruses. Something in the virus's genetic program responds to the environment and says, "Reproduce like crazy when it's cold out, when your host is low in vitamin D, when the intensity of sunlight is low." People are quick to cherry-pick the few countries that tell smashing success stories (like China driving the virus away with draconian lockdowns, or South Korea successfully implementing contact tracing) and equally quick to overlook the counterexamples (Japan having a very low death rate despite a minimal and late response, Belgium and Spain having inexplicably high death rates despite intense lockdowns). There are things about the virus that we don't understand, and no tidy narrative captures the full worldwide range of outcomes. I'm not looking to do any kind of triumphal football-spiking to the pessimists who made a bunch of wrong predictions. A lot isn't known yet. It would just be nice to see a little epistemic humility here. 

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* I don't begrudge anyone their right to hedge against a risk they find unacceptable, even if I personally think they are being irrational. Everyone has a version of this. Survivalists hedge against the risk of civilization collapsing. Martial artists hedge against the risk of being assaulted and needing to fend off the attacker. Gun enthusiasts hedge against the risk of government turning tyrannical. In each case, there is a high chance that the hedge fails when the threat materializes. (Suppose the survivalist dies of malnutrition after civilization collapses, the martial artist is shot during a mugging, the gun enthusiasts are disarmed before they can mount a defense). Still, I don't begrudge these people their hobbies. Business people are speculative in the opposite direction; a few smashing successes exist for each failure. There are countless "hedges" against various kinds of risks, with different people picking different hobby-horses to be concerned about. Some very small number of them will eventually be able to say "I told you so." I welcome them to do so. But I wouldn't let them turn society upside-down, conscripting me into their crusade against an imagined risk. Recall that I'm specifically talking about the unknown long-term after effects of covid-19, not the known, quantifiable risks. 

I am noticing that you could flip the definitions of "optimist" and "pessimist" here. Optimists are in some cases saying "It's outside of our power to control this, though we can perhaps direct it a little," which I suppose sounds pessimistic. In contrast, pessimists are saying, "We can exert enormous control over this force of nature with the right policy tools and personal hygiene."  On the other hand, "optimists" do sound optimistic about the threat Covid-19 poses to the vast majority of the population, and pessimists really do sound pessimistic about those risks, in my opinion beyond what the raw statistics warrant. 

Is "Motivated Reasoning" a Symptom?

This pandemic is really making people lose their minds. I am increasingly frustrated by the tone taken in arguments about the virus, and it's basically impossible to have a rational discussion about anything. The mode of analysis being used is 1) identify the speaker's conclusion, then 2) use 1) (perhaps along with their political orientation) to categorize the person, then 3) dismiss the rest of the argument based on 2). We're all postmodernists now. The speaker rather than the speech is the focus of every analysis. 

The problem is that true statements are being preemptively dismissed because they can be used to argue against the lockdown ("the lockdown" here could mean either public or private efforts to control the spread of the virus). When some good news is discovered, people are very quick to dismiss it, often with wild speculation. Sometimes the truth of a claim is preemptively disputed, because the listener knows how it will be employed. Other times, the truth of a claim is conceded, but the listener adamantly denies that the information weighs at all on various policy conclusions. 

Past Infection Confers Immunity

It's bizarre to see all the wild speculation that Sars-Cov-2 doesn't behave like a typical respiratory virus. An example of this is the denial that past infection confers immunity, and the related denial that a large population of recovered victims of the virus would contribute to herd immunity.

Scott Sumner wrote an excellent post defending Rand Paul here. It was really a breath of fresh air, because my impression of Sumner is that he's been slightly more alarmist about the virus than what's warranted. Rand Paul essentially said that people who survived a bout with Covid-19 with their health in tact could breath a sigh of relief and live their lives freely. A scolding Huff Po piece essentially said, Nuh uh! Because some people have been reinfected, we can't assume you have immunity! 

I find this truly moronic. Of course prior infection confers immunity, at least in the vast majority of cases. It is stunning that a major "news" source would dispute what everyone knows about viral infections. Your immune system learns to combat the virus and eventually fights it off. If this process didn't grant you some kind of immunity, you'd never get well in the first place. You'd just keep getting reinfected by the viruses that inhabit your body. (Yes, there are viruses that you don't ever recover from without medicine, like HIV. As far as I know, there are no such lingering coronaviruses.) Sumner points out that the number of reinfections has been vanishingly small. Millions of people have been infected and recovered. If reinfection were common, we'd have heard a lot more about it by now. Presumably a substantial fraction of these reinfections are real (some may be cases of people getting different viruses and thinking they've had Covid-19 twice, but I don't want to assume they're mostly false reports), but the magnitudes are tiny. At some point, we really do have to stop worrying about infinitesimal risks and focus our attention on more important things. 

(By the way, all of the vaccines grant imperfect immunity, too. There appears to be a double-standard at play, and it's leading to some very low-quality arguments.)

The Huff Po piece strikes me as motivated reasoning. They don't like the implications of Paul's suggestion, so they're trying to deny a widely understood truth about how our immune systems work. If our public health scolds could manage a more nuanced version of their recommendation, maybe we could trust them more. "It's true that prior infection confers immunity in the vast majority of cases, but a policy of allowing some people to dodge the mask mandate would likely be abused." Or "Take risks as you please, but be aware that some small fraction of you will still be susceptible, either because immunity is not permanent or because you had something other than Sars-Cov-2." They need to stop assuming the mental bandwidth of public opinion is so narrow you have to lie to the public to get compliance. 

I also understand that immunity may be time-limited. You might only have it for a few months or years, but not permanently. If immunity is time-limited in this sense, then one policy implication is that we should not have tried to flatten the curve. If people keep dropping out of the "immune to covid" population because their immunity degrades over time, then the virus will keep finding new hosts and keep going, possibly forever. This is another example where the policy implications of a factoid are poorly explored. It's as if people are just gathering bulleted lists of "things that favor my policy," not noticing at all what these factoids contribute to the other side of the ledger. 

None of this is to say we shouldn't shelter the vulnerable. It's just that whoever is likely to eventually get the virus, we should hope they all get it over a shorter period of time rather than stretched out over a longer time. The original lockdowns in March were justified under this "flatten the curve" rationale, where the area under both curves was presumably equal, but it quickly morphed into a "quash the virus" policy. I wrote about that here. Whatever the merits are to the "immunity is time-limited" argument, it has clear policy implications for a "flatten the curve" approach. My frustration, which I am trying to express in this post, is with people who fail to acknowledge that some point of fact changes the policy calculus in a direction they don't like.

Younger People Are At Negligible Risk

I wrote this post a couple of months ago, complaining that people aren't noticing that young people are at negligible risk. Or perhaps they'd grant that (the data are inescapable), but they fail to concede the obvious policy conclusion: that the relatively young and healthy should be able to go about their lives in a business-as-usual fashion. The focus should be on protecting the relatively old and the vulnerable. Certainly this implies putting some restrictions on what healthy people can do. For example, they should be isolating from the vulnerable people in their lives, and they should mask up if they're going into a mixed space. 

I don't know what's going on here. Does anyone think the risks to young people are unacceptable? This is unlikely, considering that their (negligible) risk of dying from Covid-19 is smaller than most risks we routinely subject them to. There might be some people who think it's much worse if their child dies of covid than if they die of a much more likely hazard, say an automobile accident on a frivolous outing. If people want to prioritize their own risks this way, that's their call, but such irrational risk preferences shouldn't influence public policy. 

Or is the issue that the elderly and vulnerable are more at risk if there are a bunch of diseased young people intermixing and spreading the virus? I also consider this position unserious. The vulnerable people are already isolating and taking protective measures. Now is the time for young people to live their lives, to spread the virus, to acquire herd immunity. At some point people lose their patience with the lockdown. Vulnerable people have been locked up for months without any human contact, and many of these folks are in the last few years of their lives. They could emerge into a world where most young people have already had a bout with Covid-19 and are probably immune, or they could emerge into a world of negligible immunity, where most healthy people are still potential spreaders. Misguided public health policy has ensured the latter scenario. 

(By the way, I was completely against school closures from the beginning. I think we had enough information about the age-mortality curve even at the time to recognize that school children were not at risk. Emily Oster has since collected a ton of data on school districts and viral outbreaks, and schools just don't appear to be major spreaders. Families should have been free to remove their kids from school if they were concerned about the virus, say if they had a vulnerable person in the home, and staff and teachers who weren't comfortable with the risk should have been furloughed or given some other arrangements. But totally closing the schools was unjustified and incredibly disruptive to people's lives.)

The only serious objection to the "herd immunity for the healthy" strategy is the possibility of long-term unknown health effects, which I'll treat below.

Long-term Health Impacts of Sars-Cov-2

I haven't done my homework on how to quantify the known long-term harms of Sars-Cov-2. Presumably there is enough information for someone to determine the likelihood and seriousness of various sequelae that have shown up so far. As we should. That's perfectly legitimate, and such lingering harms should affect our cost-benefit calculus for whatever mitigation measures, private or public, we wish to undertake. If any readers have done their homework and believe that known harms (or reasonable extrapolations from what's known) justify lockdowns or extreme caution from the young and healthy, please feel free to share your work. 

What I keep seeing is a broad appeal to unknown harms of the virus. There are right and wrong ways to reason about decision-making under uncertain risks, and I keep seeing the wrong way. Here's what I mean. Say you're at work and I say, "Are you sure your toilet stopped flushing this morning?" You might start to worry. "No, I'm not entirely certain. I don't usually check that. I just walk away after flushing and assume it will stop, as it always does." I didn't actually do anything that made a catastrophic flood of your home any more likely, but I put the uncomfortable thought in your head. The problem is that our stupid monkey brains treat risks as more likely just because someone mentions them. There's an evolutionary just-so story here. In an ancestral village, if someone is talking about a lion or an armed stranger from another tribe, it's probably because they saw one. It probably pays to be extra vigilant about the risks people in your village are discussing, because our ancestors probably spent their time discussing real, imminent risks. In contrast, if I just make up some hazard on the spot and speculate that it might happen, that doesn't actually make it any more likely to happen. You probably shouldn't worry about it. You can't be driving home every time you think about some potential catastrophe and feel the urge to check up on it. On the other hand, if my wife texts me and asks the same question, I really should feel worried. She probably has some information I don't about the functioning of the household plumbing. There is a big difference between informed risk management and wild speculation.* 

When someone says, "We don't know the long-term health effects of Covid-19", it is technically true. But we can't base massive policy responses to mere possibilities that come to our attention because someone blurts them out. We should infer whatever we can from our experience with other respiratory viruses, perhaps other coronaviruses or seasonal flus with similar symptoms. But if the vast majority of people who recover look like they're basically in the clear, we shouldn't speculate too much about some phantom hazard that's going to emerge in the coming years or decades. 

There is good reason for imagining novel hazards and coming up with hedges against them. I think it makes sense to spend, say, a few billion dollars a year monitoring space for extinction-threatening asteroids. It's worth doing extensive testing on GMOs** to reassure people who believe they're harmful, even if we think we understand their nature well enough to rule out any proposed harms. Nature is full of surprises, for sure. So we should be setting aside resources to limit our "tail risk." We're materially endowed enough to indulge a lot of this kind of hedging, and I think we should take it seriously. What we can't do is simply posit that some existential harm might exist and then, "given the very high stakes", marshal all of society's resources to combat it. I hear this kind of argument in climate debates all the time. (The debate, by the way, is almost never over whether the change is real, but how extreme it is, how harmful it's likely to be, and to what degree any proposed mitigation is likely to pay off.) In this Econtalk, Daniel Botkin calls this a "child's game", where I can just make up a scenario that's more extreme than the one you made up. We shouldn't take wildly speculative risks seriously; we should try to quantify them and hedge against them with a prudent use of our limited resources. I should also say that this silly game of "making up hazards" is symmetrical. Should we spend 10% of our material resources mitigating climate impacts? What if that slows economic growth such that we're not equipped to repel an asteroid strike 100 years from now, whereas under the counterfactual (in this case, spending significantly less than 10% on climate hedging) we're fully equipped? There is no such thing as "the precautionary principle" when mistakes in all directions are costly. We can't just play this silly game of "a hazard exists because I say it might exist." 

We can play this "child's game" with the vaccine, too. One can simply state that the vaccine has "unknown potential long-term harms." It's unfalsifiable. We can reason about such a proposition. We can explore what we know about how the immune system works, and why that makes any mechanism for long-term harm likely or unlikely. Aren't some of the more dangerous effects of Covid-19 caused by the body's immune response to it, rather than being caused by the virus itself? (The "cytokine storm" was a major news story for a hot minute a while ago.) Doesn't a vaccine stimulate the immune system in a way that simulates what the live virus would do? Now, it's also true that your body's bout with the live virus would be longer lasting and invoke a more extreme immune response. At the same time, let's not pretend we can use first principles to rule out unknown harms. Nature is indeed full of surprises. But if we follow this rabbit hole too far, we will become paralyzed with fear and lose any ability to make informed decisions. In this recent Dark Horse podcast, Bret and Heather discuss the "unknown unknowns" question regarding the virus itself and the vaccine. The discussion is at times insightful. They discuss the prospect of monitoring side-effects of the virus or vaccine as they emerge, and then monitoring and quantifying the specific side-effects that become known. All of this is good, and we should certainly be monitoring and quantifying known or likely hazards. But one can carry the "we can't rule this hazard out" argument too far. (There is some very interesting stuff in the Dark Horse episode about the delivery mechanism of the vaccine and the mechanics of how it "trains" your immune system.)

I have heard that some "asymptomatic" cases resulted in lung damage, which showed up on an x-ray. I have several reactions to this. First of all, "asymptomatic"? Really? Does that word mean what you think it means? I'd call lung damage a pretty serious symptom. On the other hand, if it's going unnoticed by the patient, I'm skeptical that there's material harm, even if something shows up on a scan. I'm also not sure how they connected the lung damage to Covid-19, versus some other cause. I know that doctors will sometimes use x-rays or other scanning technology on someone suffering chronic back pain and find a bulging disk or some other identifiable condition. The problem is that they will find similar insults to the spine doing the same scans on samples of healthy people. So it's hard to causally connect these conditions to the back pain. I don't know if something similar is happening here, but I do know that causal inference is hard to tease out. 

I am prepared to do an about-face on this one if something more concrete emerges regarding Sars-Cov-2. But for now I am drawing a line in the sand against Pascal's Mugging. The prospect of unknown long-term harms exists for everything: other novel viruses, new medications, vaccines, new chemical additives in our food, different dieting patterns (as in following the latest dieting fad), spending nine months in relative isolation from family and co-workers, etc. Treating unknown hazards as decisive in any cost-benefit calculus puts us all in straight-jackets. On the other hand, if anyone is doing informed speculation based on known or likely harms, I applaud them. But I want them to show their work. 

Death Certificates Often Contain Errors

There have been plenty of dumb conspiracy theories about the virus, so I understand why reasonable people are on edge about this stuff. But the low-quality arguments proffered by conspiracy theorists have at times led reasonable people to overstate their case. 

Early on, some people were commenting on the death certificates, the issue of "deaths with" versus "deaths from" covid, the possibility of a doctor wrongly attributing a cause of death (in which case the death certificate really would imply that Covid-19 was the cause, but would perhaps be in error). I initially (early March) thought this could be a big deal. But then the excess deaths data started coming in. Covid-19 is deadly enough to make the all-cause mortality higher than it should have been, comparing the same week from prior years. I wrote about that here. And I noted here that our worst flu season in recent memory, 2017-2018, shows a spike in overall deaths. So that was a definitive nail in the coffin of the "cause of deaths are just being misidentified" hypothesis. Also, the experience of places like New York and northern Italy were inconsistent with this virus being some kind of mass hysteria. It was clear by then that this really was a novel and dangerous threat.

On the other hand, I saw some dumb responses on social media. "Oh, so your judgment is better than a doctor's? So you, as a keyboard warrior, are overruling a doctor's judgment?" This is silly, because doctors often disagree about a cause of death. (See studies here and here; I quote them in this post.) Misidentifying the cause of death is common. It is entirely possible that a cause of deaths gets misidentified in a systematic way. It is possible for this to lead to a spurious trend in the official statistics, and for the "public health" establishment to mount a wrong-headed response to this trend. We need to be alert to this possibility. We shouldn't dismiss it just because it happens to be an arrow in the quiver of conspiracy nuts. 

There are plenty of other poor quality arguments regarding the virus. I'm sure I've indulged some myself. But these are the ones that have been bothering me lately. 

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*I actually did come home one day to find that a toilet had been flushing all day. The chain that connected the flapper valve to the handle came off and blocked the flapper valve from sealing. Luckily, it wasn't blocked or anything. It could have been worse. It was the downstairs toilet, which relies on a pump to actually dispose of the water. That pump burned out a few weeks ago and we had to replace it. If it had burnt out the same day that the chain came undone, it would have been a significant flood event in my basement. So in my case this is a known hazard that I worry about and have to occasionally check on. But I shouldn't break out in cold sweat if someone suggests a novel hazard might exist, nor should I drop whatever I'm doing to go check on it. 

**On GMOs and tail risk, Nassim Taleb went on a ridiculous tirade against them a few years ago. The flavor is captured in this Econtalk. He posited that they might be an existential threat, "ecocide" is what he called it. He insisted that he didn't even have to come up with a plausible mechanism by which this could happen. (Seriously!)  Many experts on GMOs insisted that it couldn't happen, and gave various reasons based on how these things are tested and how they work. Some pointed out that a similar mechanism happens in nature, with long segments of DNA from one species being transported to another (by a virus, as it happens). Taleb had an analogy ready involving a roulette wheel maker and a statistician. Something to the tune of: the statistician knows something about the nature of the roulette wheel that the mere craftsman doesn't understand. It's kind of ironic, because roulette wheel makers are well aware of the statistical properties of the game and are very careful to ensure the wheel is well-balanced. Any imbalance will be detected and exploited, and the results could be ruinous for a casino. If you're trying to quantify tail risk, talk to experts. Ignore random hypotheses that "X might happen", same as you would ignore someone asking if your toilet stopped flushing.

What Happens if the President Tries to Just "Hold Power?"

 This is from Christopher Hitchens's book The Trial of Henry Kissinger

At the close of [Nixon’s] reign, in an episode more typical of a banana republic or a “people’s democracy,” his own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.

Schlesinger had excellent grounds for circumspection. Not only had he learned that Nixon had asked the Joint Chiefs “whether in a crunch there was enough support to keep him in power,” but he had also been told the following by Joseph Laitin…

Emphasis mine. What follows is a story about Nixon barreling down the steps, two steps at a time, knocking over Laitin and being followed by his Secret Service detail.

Obviously this was a very dangerous time for the republic. Nixon could have triggered a serious constitutional crisis by trying to stay in power after the official processes would remove him (impeachment in this case). 

I think of this whenever people try to paint Trump as this unique threat to our republic. I always wonder how far back people's political memories actually go when I hear alarmist claims about Trump seizing power. I remember talking about Bush 2 with my friends, including how he was going to use all the extra-constitutional powers he grabbed for himself after 9/11. Of course, he was going to use all those powers to imprison his political opponents and spirit away dissident voices. No doubt there were some serious abuses of power and some questionable foreign policy (to use a grotesque euphemism for killing lots of civilians and sparking civil wars). But as far as I can tell, there was a process in place. There were checks that would have stopped him from going full-on dictator. Bush knew it, and presumably so did Nixon. Nixon may have tested the waters for an unconstitutional power grab, but ultimately he must have surmised that American institutions would hold and would ultimately check a power-mad president's attempt to stay in office. The Nixon episode demonstrates a couple of things. One, that presidents often contemplate holding on to power, and two, they are likely to recognize that it's not really an option. If it's alarming to realize that a threat is ever-lurking, at the same time it should be comforting to recognize that it is always being held in check. Whatever forces Nixon recognized as checking the president's power are still in place. Even if we think of Trump as less intelligent and more brash version of Nixon, Nixon's calculus probably still applies. 

A recent Reason Roundtable podcast has an exchange that echoes my own conversations about the "Trump refuses to step down" scenario. Peter Sudermann makes some vague hints at the possibility, and Nick Gillespie (who is really speaking my language on this particular episode) has a "What the fuck?" reaction and pushes back. He suggests a useful exercise: spell out the actual scenario you're worried about. Is the problem that Trump will complain about the fairness of the election? Obviously he's been doing that, and he's filed some pretty baseless lawsuits challenging the election results. If that's the scenario, it's a pretty low bar for "the crumbling of the republic" or a "constitutional crisis." There is always grousing about the fairness of an election, and it often leads to lawsuits. Bush vs. Gore? (Seriously, how far back to people's political memories go?) I remember grumblings about the then new voting machines in the Bush vs. Kerry election. Some people were seriously alleging that Bush stole the election in 2004. (Remember the Diebold voting machines? The lack of a paper trail being a big deal? Wikipedia, as always, has a good page covering the controversy.) There are always problems and anomalies in any election, and sore losers will always latch on to these as being decisive and discrediting the process, especially considering the narrow margins by which elections are often won. By this standard, there is nothing too unusual about this election. (Or should I say, by this standard every election in the past 20 years has had its legitimacy undermined by major political actors.) Maybe Trump is a bit more impulsive about indulging conspiracy theories, and maybe his rhetoric is more corrosive to the process than what we're used to. I don't doubt that there's something uniquely destructive about Trump. But there is a process, and it will most likely adjudicate this mess and remove him from office. 

Or is the scenario that's being posited here a more sinister one? Does Trump simply physically refuse to leave? (As I recall, in the Reason podcast someone mentions the scenario where Trump literally barricades himself inside the White House with furniture.) I had discussed this exact scenario with someone a while ago. They suggested that the Secret Service would carry out their duty to protect "the president" by physically removing him. ("Sir? It's time to go, sir.") I think that's the most plausible way for that scenario to play out. Assuming Trump does throw such an epic tantrum, I find it just unbelievable that the rest of the power structure in Washington would go along with it. His supporters are by now suggesting that he concede the election, and his lawsuits are being laughed out of court by incredulous judges. Republicans, who surely would prefer to hold power in an all-else-equal sense, are recognizing the damage that Trump's tantrums are causing to their brand. In the existing process, the president doesn't actually have to "concede." That's kind of the point of the election, that the ousted former leader doesn't actually need to consent to giving up power. It's a process outside the president's control that determines who holds office next. Obviously this breaks down in some truly dysfunctional countries, but it's a bit over the top to claim that it will happen here. 

In the Reason podcast, I think Katherine Mangu-Ward defends "alarmism" by referring to "tail risk." As in, this is a remote scenario that would be very bad if it were to happen. Maybe the probability of a republic-crumbling power-grab increased from a background level of, say, 1% to 2%? Of course that's very bad, in an "expected value" sense, but still very remote. Some commentators are talking about this scenario as if it's likely to happen. Is their rhetoric just short-hand for "It's a very remote possibility, but given the expected costs it's very much worth worrying about and hedging against."? 

___________________________

Go back to the Nixon quote for a moment. I'm imagining Trump trying something similar. His presidency is pockmarked with leaks of embarrassing private moments. People in his administration weren't shy about exposing his buffoonish behavior. They were perfectly willing to embarrass and undermine him. If he had made a similar comment to Nixon's to his own military advisors, I'm pretty sure it would have been front-page news. 

I'm going to be slightly petty here and discuss an exchange I had on Facebook in late 2016. I'm using it to point out that there is nothing uniquely "right wing" or Trumpian about believing outlandish election conspiracy theories. In 2016, Trump was anticipating a defeat and, prior to the election, speculating about all the ways that it was going to be "stolen" from him. Trump's critics were mocking him, some saying that stealing an election was "impossible." I pushed back, recalling the 2004 shenanigans and the stupid conspiracy theories that were being floated at the time, in that case by Kerry supporters. Trump's critics were making an argument that they didn't actually believe, according to their own past behavior. Someone accused me of being silly and perhaps misremembering the prevalence of the 2004 griping, and he did it in a "Gee, I don't remember that." tone of voice. This person had written for the campus newspaper, and it turned out he had engaged in silly conspiracy mongering in print. I managed to find an archived copy of his opinion piece and scolded him for trying to gaslight me. Of course, when the 2016 election results came in, election meddling was suddenly possible again, and not only "possible" but determinative. People have very short memories, particularly when it's convenient to forget something. It's definitely a lot worse when the president himself (or the president's vanquished challenger) is questioning the validity of an election. But the behavior itself is part of out ecosystem. The republic survives. 

There is still time for me to be wrong here. Maybe Trump will try to declare martial law or do something else that's truly outlandish. Maybe he'll actually succeed in staying in power, despite official channels rebuking him (as in losing his lawsuits, often to the ruling of a Republican judge). I don't know what to say here. Betcha he won't? Propose an exact scenario and we can discuss 1) the likelihood and 2) whether it constitutes an existential threat to the system or run-of-the-mill post-election grousing. 

By the way, this is all coming from someone who is very worried about unconstitutional power grabs, generally speaking. I see a historical march of ever expanding executive power and an implicit conspiracy to jailbreak the plain-spoken meaning of the US Constitution. I see the U.S. government and the various state governments doing things they have no rightful authority to do. I just see this particular scenario as pretty implausible, and not for a lack of bad intentions. 

Mostly Peaceful

I'm not quite sure what "mostly peaceful" means. I keep hearing this term in reference to the protests in Portland. Presumably it means something like "Most of the people involved in the protest aren't committing violence" or "Most of the time, there is no violence happening." It's certainly fair to get defensive if someone is trying to discredit a righteous protest movement by pointing to a few errant acts of violence and property destruction. I think that the vast majority of protesters aren't themselves committing acts of violence or vandalism.

Then again, I think it's easy to lampoon this concept of "mostly peaceful" if it's defined too broadly. My favorite example comes from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's Dark Horse Podcast. (I couldn't tell you which episode, unfortunately.) They point out that the procession of John F. Kennedy's presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas was 99.9% non-violent. They also point to several wars in which the populations of the warring nations were mostly non-violent. (I believe they took some of these examples from another source, but I haven't been able to locate it.) The point is that you can't judge the violent or peaceful nature of something by the raw proportion of individuals behaving violently, or the fraction of time in which violence is happening. There are several criteria that may define a phenomenon as violent even if the "proportion" of violence (as a ratio of individuals or time or whatever) is relatively small.

1. There is an implicit threat of violence far out of proportion to actual violence committed. (Such as protestors shouting "Get out of your homes and into the streets!" over a bull-horn at night in a residential neighborhood, while shining bright lights into the windows of darkened homes. Or, say, surrounding a restaurant patron at a sidewalk dining space and demanding them to pledge fealty to the cause.) 
2. Violence erupts at predictable times or under predictable conditions. (Weinstein gives the examples of the Portland protests turning into riots when night falls. The CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle might be another example of a "mostly peaceful" phenomenon with predictable violence at certain times of the day or night.)
3. Supporters of the legitimate goals of the movement decline or refuse to distance themselves from acts of violence. (Obviously this is related to 1. A refusal to rule out violence means you implicitly align yourselves with violent enforcers.)
4. Related to 3, there is a refusal to admit that violence has in fact happened.
5. Also related to 3, activists who are looking for a fight find it very easy to attach themselves to and co-opt the otherwise legitimate protest movement. (I think some of the Antifa folks and left-anarchists have always been in the background looking for a street fight, and some of them have latched on to this as an excuse to start fights and destroy property.) 
6. The violence that does happen (or is merely threatened) has a disproportionate impact. It causes fear far out of proportion to the act itself. (Again, this is closely related to 1. "Setting an example" is a kind of implicit threat to engage in future violence, whether it actually happens or not.) 
7. Permissiveness toward minor threats or small acts of violence encourage or portend future acts of violence. (Think: failure to stop Hitler while he was merely saber-rattling, or when his hostile intentions became clear but he was still weak enough to be contained.) 
8. Advocacy of policy goals that will almost certainly lead to more violence. (I think suddenly abolishing the police and indiscriminately releasing felons, as some have advocated, qualify for this one.) 

I could probably think of others, and I could probably be talked into removing some of these items from the list. There were some black lives matter protest marches in my city which I truly would describe as non-violent. I would unironically call them "mostly peaceful". There was a single case of looting at one store (there was more looting in nearby cities), but I would not let that tarnish the overall message of the movement. Probably most communities were like this. I would contrast this with a movement that openly endorses looting and property destruction as righteous forms of protest. I would also contrast this with a movement that denies any connection between the looting and the protest movement. Oddly I hear both kinds of excuse-making, often from the very same people. "It's not happening" or "It's a false-flag attack by right-wing activists" combined with "Looting and rioting are actually defensible modes of protest." This suggests a panicked effort to dismiss the problem rather than engage with it. 

It's also useful to imagine a mirror image of this. Suppose there was a right-wing version of a street protest movement with a few violent actors. How does that narrative play out? How legitimate would the "mostly peaceful" label seem? Charlottesville 2017 comes to mind. Just think of how tone-deaf it sounds to refer to the white nationalists as "mostly peaceful," one of them having intentionally killed a counter-protester with his car. But imagine a less racially charged object of the protestors' outrage. Say it's a tax revolt of some kind, Tea Party 2.0. I seriously doubt the "mostly peaceful" modifier would survive a single act of violence, or the assault on or occupation of a single piece of government property. Or imagine a headline saying that protesters were beaten back by "mostly peaceful police officers." There is some kind of double standard at play here. In the case of phalanxes of police officers in riot gear confronting a crowd, in the case of well-armed right-wing militia men aggregating outside a government building, and in the case of left-anarchist mobs gathering at a building that's been the repeated target of arson, there is an implicit threat of violence. In all three cases, the "mostly peaceful" descriptor is a sick joke. It's conceivable that a righteous enough cause justifies the use of violence, threatened or realized. It's not conceivable that righteousness converts violence to non-violence. "Yep, we get to use violence because we're the good guys and they're the bad guys" would at least be the start of an honest discussion. 

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. 

_______________________________

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. 

The Mystery of the Kibbutz

 Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it. 

-Joshua Muravchik. 

This is the chapter 9 intro in The Mystery of the Kibbutz

I wrote this post a few months ago about the kibbutzim (the plural of "kibbutz"), the Israeli experiments in private socialism (very much ongoing experiments). At the time, I had listened to the Econtalk episode featuring Ran Abramitzky, the author of The Mystery of the Kibbutz. Since then, I have read the book, and it's excellent. I will say, having listened to the podcast multiple times, that it captures the major themes of the book. Reading the book fills in interesting details, but Ran discusses all the major arguments with Russ Roberts. 

The book is quite charming. It starts with Ran asking some annoying questions of his uncle, a kibbutznik (a member of a kibbutz). Ran was not naive to the concept. Many of his close family members were also raised in a kibbutz. But Ran was studying economics at the time that he (unwittingly) picked a fight with his uncle. His economics training raised some serious questions. If everyone gets the same pay regardless of effort, wouldn't there be slacking? On a related note, wouldn't there be a "brain drain" problem and also an "adverse selection problem"? In other words, a society that gives equal pay regardless of actual contribution would repel highly productive individuals, who could earn more on the private market, and attract slackers, whose poor work ethic would limit their market earnings? Wouldn't the kibbutzim be left with the "dregs" (brain drain + adverse selection), who inhabit a society that facilitates slacking (the incentive problem)? How do the kibbutzim survive at all given these seemingly insurmountable problems? (Thus the "mystery" in the book's title.)

It turns out there isn't much of a mystery here. The kibbutzim were always a small proportion of the Jewish population of Israel. At their height, they made up about 7% of the Jewish population. (Abramitzky points out that the kibbutzim were mostly an Ashkenazi phenomenon; very few if any Arabs or Sephardi were members of these institutions. Thus the qualifier about the percent of the Jewish population.) The book includes a graph tracking this over time (note that the points are annotated with the total population, while the axis shows the percent of the Jewish population). Asking why the kibbutz can exist in the face of economic incentive problems is like asking why people upload random videos to Youtube. Most people don't, but there are just enough who do that we can find almost any random clip we remember from old, obscure cartoons. In the Econtalk interview, Russ Roberts offers the example of Wikipedia. We don't need to reconcile Wikipedia with economic theories that say we're self-interested, that we will under-produce public goods. We only need to posit that there are a few charitable, public-goods-producing individuals in the world. A small fraction of the population being so inclined means we get Wikipedia. By similar reasoning, a small fraction of Israel's population live in functioning communes that have lasted a century. 

The book gives an origin story of the kibbutzim and an account of how they began to decline. It turns out that Abramitzky had the right insight when he pestered his uncle with rude questions. The kibbutzim began to break down in ways that a hard-headed economist would predict. It was not so easy to create a new "socialist man," not even when the commune begins its life with willing volunteers who are ideologically committed to the enterprise. Human nature is not infinitely malleable, it turns out. The kibbutzim made concessions, compromising on the purest form of their ideology, to keep their members from leaving. 

The brain drain and adverse selection problems were very real, it turns out. Abramitzky presents evidence that low-income individuals were more likely to enter, and high-income individuals more likely to leave, the kibbutzim. The kibbutzniks implicitly understood these problems, because they designed their institutions to counter them. It turns out the kibbutzim were rather exclusive. You could not simply show up and join. They were wisely suspicious of any would-be members trying to join their community. I don't know if they were explicitly asking, "What if this guy joins our commune, becomes eligible for an equal share of our production, but just slacks off all day?" But they were surely aware that this was a potentially fatal threat to their community. There was a long, intrusive interview process for people wanting to join. There were also long trial periods, after which members could be rejected. According to Abramitzky:

Applicants also had to go through a lengthy interview, fill out forms about their own and their children’s physical and mental health, and submit a curriculum vitae. The committee even sent a sample of applicants’ handwriting to be analyzed by a graphologist, with the hope of gaining more insight into applicants’ character and intentions. Finally, applicants had to answer a long questionnaire meant to assess whether they were suited to living in a kibbutz.

Emphasis mine. If private socialism has to be this exclusive to function, it is just completely absurd to think that it would work out fine if it were imposed on everyone, all at once, as a political system. Historical examples of political socialism get dismissed as "not real socialism" by its proponents. Okay, fine, but here we have an example of real socialism in practice. It goes to great lengths to keep the riff raff out, so to speak. Maybe the lesson here is that this doesn't work, except for a very small and highly committed subset of the population. It certainly doesn't scale up very well. The book discusses at length the average size of a kibbutz and the (unrealized) possibility of having one big kibbutz rather than a few hundred small ones. 

Note also the part about screening for the health of family members. The kibbutzniks knew what insurance companies know about adverse selection: keeping a safety net viable means screening out expensive liabilities. 

Abramitzky discusses at length how the kibbutzim solved the incentive problem (the tendency of an existing member to slack), the brain drain problem, and the adverse selection problem. Some of these solutions trade off against each other, such that solving one makes other problems worse. For example, one solution to the adverse selection problem is to have a very strong sense of community with shared, deeply-felt norms of behavior. The stricter, the better. If the vetting process for a new member is a months-long ordeal of ascetic living and strict adherence to religious principles, that will surely deter slackers who just want to free ride on their neighbors' community spiritedness. The book discusses many American communes, reaching all the way back to early colonial times, that used similar "trial periods" to see if would-be members were truly committed. In addition to weeding out bad applicants, this process also fosters a sense of community and solves the incentive problem. Someone who has sacrificed to acquire this shared sense of community will feel bad about slacking off at the expense of his neighbors. Losing the esteem of your colleagues means losing something that you fought hard for. ("Sunk cost" nothing; you value something quite highly when you pay for it with blood and sweat.) People are inherently social creatures. They will feel the sneers of their neighbors who notice them not working to their full potential, and their meals at the communal dining hall will be awkward, possibly lonely. Social censure was a strong incentive not to slack off. 

The trade-off here is that strict religious orders, work protocols, and always-prying eyes of your neighbors will drive out the marginal member, who aren't fully committed to the cause. That is, it exacerbates the brain drain problem even as it solves the incentive and adverse selection problems. In the kibbutzim, this trade-off was most evident in the grown children of kibbutzniks. The founders of kibbutzim were extremely committed individuals who opted in voluntarily. Their children had made no such choice; the "opting in" was decided for them. They often realized that the kibbutz life was too strict for them, and many of them ultimately opted out. Given the decline in the kibbutz population over time (at least in percentage terms), it looks like the "exit option" was a serious threat to the kibbutz's long-term viability. Kibbutzim made many concessions, compromising on socialist ideals, in order to keep their members from leaving. (Abramitzky mentions his mother's exasperation with the lack of privacy. She had been raised in a kibbutz and decided to leave. Whenever anyone asked, "Mother, where are you going?" she would respond, "I stopped answering that question thirty years ago when I left the kibbutz!") 

The book highlights the many concessions the kibbutzim made to retain their members. Early on in the history of the kibbutzim, children were raised together communally, living and spending most of their days with the other children but separate from their parents. This practice arose from their communitarian ideology. Children who grew up together with other children would have a shared experience, in a way that children raised individually by their own parents would not. It might foster a sense of community that would ensure the long-term survival of the community. This fought an uphill battle against human nature: parents like to raise their own children. By the early 70s and 80s, all kibbutzim had abandoned the practice of separating children from their parents. 

The kibbutzim were compelled to institute further market-style reforms in the 80s. Part of this was a continuation of a pre-existing pattern, but it was partly brought on by financial shocks in the mid- to late-1980s. (The book calls this a "debt crisis". Apparently these socialist mini-utopias saw fit to tap into capitalist financial markets?) Kibbutzniks felt the hit. They were suddenly poorer than they thought they were, and they felt the decline in their material standards of living. The exit problem reared its ugly head. Why live poorly in a kibbutz when you can go live in the city and earn a better living as a software engineer or a derivatives trader? The more talented individuals would feel particularly compelled to leave. They would see the highest gains in material standards of living by opting out. There were some fierce ideological battles over this, but the kibbutzim ultimately compromised on the notion of complete communal sharing. Early kibbutzniks didn't personally handle any money at all, but gradually the kibbutzim started paying small salaries to their members. And, more and more, they began paying those salaries in accordance with productivity. Abramitzky includes a useful chart:

There were other market-style reforms. Initially the kibbutzim had communal dining halls. People simply came to them and ate at meal time. This was ultimately discovered to be wasteful, and kibbutzim implemented a practice of paying for one's own meals. On the one hand, this killed an important source of community. Kibbutzniks ate at home rather than in the dining hall. On the other hand, it fostered frugal use of scarce resources. Quoting Daniel Gavron, the book gives the following passage:

[T] he kibbutzim were living beyond their means was an acknowledged fact, but there were also several endemic weaknesses in communal life, one of which was wastage. Food was “free,” so members took more than they needed. Huge quantities were thrown away, and expensive items were fed to domestic animals. Electricity was paid for by the collective, so members left their air conditioners on all day in the summer and their heaters on all winter.

Any libertarian or conservative-leaning economist would tell you that this is perfectly predictable. Put simply, people respond to incentives. They will overuse resources when the costs of those resources are socialized, and they will discover restraint and frugality when they're financially responsible for the costs of their actions. 

On the privatization of salaries and living expenses, Abramitzky writes:

Under the reformed system, private allowances to members were extended, and members used these allowances to pay for their own electricity consumption. In 1990, less than 10 percent of kibbutzim had adopted this reform, but by 2001 about 80 percent had done so. Kibbutzim even started to turn their dining halls into cafeterias where members paid for their meals. Whereas in 1990, no kibbutz charged its members for meals, 70 percent did so by 2001.

These tiny socialist paradises eventually discovered the need for management expertise:

On the production side, kibbutzim started to privatize many of the kibbutz production and service branches by turning them into independent centers, whose goal was solely to reduce costs and maximize profits. Importantly, they were now able to make decisions without having to consult kibbutz members. This change was in part motivated by the 1989 negotiations between the government, banks, and kibbutzim to settle the debts of kibbutzim, which called for kibbutzim to increase accountability for costs and profits. The kibbutz federations required their member kibbutzim to introduce reforms but left it to the discretion of each kibbutz to pick which reforms to adopt. For that purpose, many kibbutzim set up “innovation teams” to identify appropriate reforms. But kibbutzim went further in this process than simply improving the transparency of their balance sheets. Besides turning the dining hall into a restaurant and the branches into businesses, kibbutzim hired outside managers to run their economy and paid high salaries to these professionals. By 1997, more than half of the kibbutzim adopted this reform. These reforms achieved a clear separation between kibbutzim’s economy and community. Outside managers, all with university degrees and considerable professional experience, were hired to run kibbutzim’s economy without consideration of whether they cared about the kibbutz way of life; kibbutz members in leadership positions, such as the kibbutz secretary, were in charge of running the kibbutz community.

One could try to tell an "economic duress" story, in which they were compelled by insidious capitalist forces to implement market-style reforms. But it seems pretty clear that they took on debt voluntarily, and not necessarily irrationally, and were simply dealing fairly with their creditors. Someone who wishes to tell the economic duress narrative can fill in the counter-factual: What should have happened? What would they have done if they hadn't been tempted by the fruits of capitalism? 

I found this next part truly interesting. They discovered the classic insights of David Ricardo:

Kibbutzim also discovered the economic principle of comparative advantage: “A lawyer who was also a skilled cowman could be replaced relatively cheaply, and his monetary value to the kibbutz was much greater as a lawyer than as an agricultural worker” (Near 1997, p. 353). Kibbutzim began encouraging members to seek high-paying jobs outside the kibbutz and to establish small businesses within the kibbutz.

In other words, put someone to work at their highest valued task, even if that means earning income on the open market and sharing that income communally. 

The book discusses other market-style reforms. Some of the janitorial and food-service work were done by contractors rather than kibbutz members. Clothing had initially been subject to communal sharing, in a "just grab a suit off the rack" sense, if I'm reading the book correctly. But people wanted to own their clothes, maybe even have an individual sense of style. 

Abramitzky tells an "incentives trump ideology" story in Chapter 9. What's perhaps more interesting than the market reforms is their correlation with a kibbutz's wealth. Kibbutzim differed in their material endowments: productivity, land-wealth, debt, total population, etc. A very wealthy kibbutz with a large endowment might weather a financial hit better than one that is closer to bankruptcy. The less endowed kibbutzim were quicker to institute market reforms (though, as hinted at above, virtually all kibbutzim ultimately implemented these to some degree or another). Once again, incentives matter. A kibbutzim whose immediate survival depends on making market-style reforms will implement them sooner. One with a financial buffer has the luxury of indulging ideology. Ideology matters, but incentives matter, too.

The following wasn't a major theme of the book, but the extremely hard work required to run a kibbutz bears mention. Chapter 5 begins with a quote from Jerry Seinfeld:

I worked in the banana groves.  .  .  . I couldn’t take it any longer! It was hard work; you guys work hard in Israel. I didn’t like the kibbutz. Nice Jewish boys from Long Island don’t like to get up at six in the morning to pick bananas. At six in the morning you should be sleeping! And bananas? All summer long I found ways to get out of work.

In the Econtalk interview with the author (linked above), Russ Roberts discusses his own experience on the kibbutz. He had to clean irrigation lines with a pin and pick peaches:

I think I've mentioned this to listeners before--picking fruit and cleaning out irrigation lines with a pin. Squatting on the ground every 18". They are just far enough apart so that if you crouch down to get one, you can't reach the next one. So you have to get up, crouch down again. It's a fantastic motivator to actually stay in school.

Roberts also picked peaches, he says, which he found mind-numbingly boring. Maybe some people can do that all day and feel fulfilled, seeing the literal fruits of their labor accumulate after a long day. But I can see how some people would start to fantasize about their options and think of an exit plan. Maybe being a derivatives trader doesn't sound so bad to someone who picks peaches in the hot sun all day. There is an inherent appeal to using your brain, your creativity and imagination, to solve business problems. Hearing these anecdotes gives one a visceral understanding of why the kibbutzim had trouble keeping its members from leaving. 

The kibbutzim didn't scale up very well. They never did, even before the market reforms began to take place in earnest. Abramitzky puts it this way:

Kibbutzim have always been relatively small. They vary in size from about 100 to just over 1,000 members, with an average of 440 members (as of 1995). The majority of kibbutzim have between 200 and 600 members. Why are kibbutzim so small? Why not create a single kibbutz with 100,000 members that would be more self-sufficient instead of many small ones? Kibbutzim have struggled with the issue of size from the very beginning, recognizing the trade-off between returns to scale, on the one hand, and the strong social ties and idealistic core, on the other. 

This is an important piece of information for anyone who wishes to impose socialism on an entire society via the political system, or for anyone who wishes to resist such efforts. Indeed, why not have just one large kibbutz? The various levers of control over the slacking, brain drain, and adverse selection problems would not be as effective in a large, relatively anonymous commune. Social censure against slackers is harder when you aren't intimately involved in each neighbor's business (which becomes impossible when the population gets too large). And why bother to punish slackers when so little of the benefits of enforcement accrue to you? A larger collective means the costs of profligate consumption and the benefits of work effort are more diffuse, less likely to be noticed or remedied by any individual. Re-read the paragraph above about the exclusivity of the kibbutzim. Kibbutniks coldly knew that they could not simply scale up their tiny paradise to an entire society. Presumably some of them went a step further and realized that you couldn't simply throw together the rejects, those who wished to join a kibbutz but weren't allowed in, into their own commune and expect success. Successful kibbutzim required tremendous amounts of labor from ideologically dedicated individuals, tapping from the most talented and highly educated pool of applicants in human history. The suggestion that an entire nation could be run in this way is almost a sick joke. 

This book undeniably has some lessons for the age old debate on "socialism versus capitalism." When someone who is skeptical of socialism tries to point to the many, many examples of socialism being tried in the 20th century, they are typically rebuked with "But that's not real socialism!" "Real socialism" supposedly doesn't use coercion or have dominance hierarchies, so the many failed examples of politically imposed socialism aren't seen as legitimate specimens. It would be harder to rule out the example of the kibbutzim. These were voluntary societies of ideologically committed socialists, with plenty of material endowments and human capital to keep them going. They still broke down, declining in number and discarding their ideals in a trajectory that any cold-hearted capitalist could have predicted. 

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I found this part interesting:

Kibbutzim did not make use of external pension funds, because this seemed redundant given the system of mutual aid. However, as many skilled members started to leave their kibbutz, there was no one left to support the older generation. To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem— as of 2010 about 30– 50 percent of kibbutz members were retired. In an attempt to provide a decent standard of living for the retired population, in 2005 the government required kibbutzim to pay a pension of 35 percent of the average wage.

Catch that? The government told the kibbutzim that they had to increase the compensation paid to their retired members. Were the elderly kibbutzniks inadequately cared for? Or was the government of Israel simply wrong about the necessity of this measure? It is just surreal to me that the government would observe all this community and "equal sharing" and rule it inadequate.