Stop It

I’ve become increasingly annoyed by an expression journalists and commentators use to describe public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It seems like every day I read or hear somewhere that there’s “no plan” to deal with the surge in cases and overwhelmed hospital ICU’s, there’s “no plan” to deal with the looming economic catastrophe when expanded unemployment benefits expire at the end of July and the nation is gripped by an unprecedented wave of evictions, there’s “no plan” to provide education or childcare when the school year is supposed to begin in August or September, and so on.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. There is a plan, and denying it won’t make it any less horrifying.

Stop saying there’s no plan just because the plan is horrifying

If you spend much time at all around poker players, you quickly learn to identify a kind of charming fatalism: obviously poker players prefer to win hands rather than lose them, but there’s no skill in being dealt winning or losing combinations of playing cards. What poker players take the most pride in is not winning, but correctly calculating their odds of winning, and then betting, calling, raising and folding accordingly.

Poker players, and occasionally economists, tend to assert that this attitude is natural, common and desirable: people do, and should, go through life making calculated bets on various outcomes, and those with better calculators see more success than those who calculate poorly, just as over the course of a week, year, or career poker players who are able to calculate their odds faster and better tend to win money from those who calculate poorly or slowly (or not at all, like most of us weekend poker warriors). The retired player Annie Duke wrote a whole book with this very premise.

There are two related problems with this idea: humans are exceptionally bad at calculating odds, and humans know they are exceptionally bad at calculating odds. If only one were true, there might still be hope: good calculators would rise over bad calculators, precisely as good poker players over time outperform bad poker players. But because people are self-aware enough to know they’re bad calculators, they largely refuse to participate. To put it slightly differently, getting to the final table at the World Series of Poker requires a tremendous amount of skill, but which of the nine highly-skilled players takes a ring home reverts to a matter of luck.

What are sometimes called cognitive “errors” are often adaptations to our self-conscious inadequacy as calculators. For example, “loss aversion” is sometimes used disparagingly to describe the willingness of people to “overpay” for products like life insurance or annuitized income compared to their actuarial value. But it’s at least equally true to say the so-called “error” is a recognition of the difficulty of quickly and accurately calculating the value of those products. Likewise, health insurance deductibles and cost sharing are supposed to encourage people to carefully calibrate the amount of care they need and are willing and able to pay for. Unsurprisingly, people hate them because they recognize the task is beyond their abilities.

For precisely the same reason, rich democratic societies implement income redistribution, old-age and disability pensions, and public service provision not as well-calibrated bets on their likely costs and benefits, but in acknowledgment of the uncertainty of those costs and benefits. It’s better to have SNAP benefits and not need them than to need them and not have them.

I say all this because it gets to the core of the public policy response to the pandemic. It is incorrect to say that there is “no plan” to respond to the wave of death, homelessness, and poverty about to sweep the country. The problem is that the nation’s governing party is attempting to follow Annie Duke’s advice and “think in bets,” perfectly sizing policy according to the weighted average of all the possible outcomes. As we saw in the example of poker, the fact that public policy has failed does not mean the calculation was wrong — even a perfectly sized bet will lose if the cards fall the wrong way. But that is why we do not ask and should not ask our politicians to think in bets: we know, as they should know, that it is not something we or they are capable of doing with any precision.

Over and over again the Republican Party has placed bets on the course of the virus, and over and over again the nation has lost those bets. This does not mean the bets were improperly sized, or the odds incorrectly calculated. But it does mean our leaders were attempting something they should have known they have no capacity to do, and so we pay the price for their hubris.

Stop saying schools can re-open

While the idea of the Senate going on a three-week holiday while the country braces for impact is revolting, I find the best illustration of this problem to be various states’ plans to begin the school year on schedule at the end of August or beginning of September (a bit less than two months away). Perhaps students will alternate weeks of in-person instruction in order to allow for social distancing, or perhaps they’ll attend on alternating days, or perhaps we’ll repurpose recreational facilities or football fields to allow mass instruction on Jumbotron screens.

This is fiction. By October 1, virtually every school in the country will be closed. I can say this with complete confidence not because I know anything about epidemiology, disease transmission, vaccine development, or the latest clinical trial results. Instead, I say it with complete confidence because it is an example of public officials doing something they cannot and should not try to do: perfectly calibrate a policy response so that the downside risks and harms are perfectly matched by the upside risks and benefits.

Again, if you don’t like the outcome of millions of parents forced to choose between working or childcare, paying rent or facing eviction, feeding themselves or feeding their children, living independently or moving in with friends or family, then say so. But don’t say there’s no plan. That is the plan.

Stop spreading the virus

Of course, we’ve known the solution to the pandemic for months, because it has worked everywhere it has been tried: stay at home whenever possible, practice social distancing, wear a face covering over your nose and mouth whenever possible, wash your hands with soap and warm water whenever possible, use a 60%+ alcohol hand sanitizer when soap and water aren’t available.

But note, this is the opposite of thinking in bets. Don’t go to bars or restaurants when they “aren’t too crowded.” Don’t hold parties with “just a few friends.” Don’t leave your face covering at home when you’re just running a “quick errand.” You aren’t capable of making those calculations, and you know it.

Of course, if our rulers knew it, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.