A Letter from a Concerned Citizen,

Dear all,

We are living in strange times. Very strange - but then again - explainable and expected given long standing shifts in the way in which the state, society and the nation work.

It’s odd how the norms and assumptions that underpin everything that we have ever known can dissolve into nothingness. What’s even worse is when these basic assumptions are replaced with new ones – and these new assumptions become unquestionable on pain of social ostracization. This is the world we live in. This is what society has become. I’m not saying Covid-19 is not a threat, but it is to say that I do not think that we are giving enough conceptual space to those policies that may indeed be better solutions to the peculiar situation we find ourselves in.

Having political debates is essential, even when information is limited. Limited information is a fact of life, it is not just a Covid-19 thing. It is relatively clear that there is a debate to be had. The much-cited and simplistic ‘Economy versus Lives’ dichotomy tells us something rather basic but essential – there is a trade-off, it exists, and there is a wrong and right side of this. It also tells us something else – there is a perceived right answer to this, in the unquestionably invaluability of human life, and that anyone who says that we should politically prioritise anything else is a heartless materialist. I think many things about this are very wrong, and are not only wrong, but are potentially dangerous. Despite this, it would be equally dangerous to pretend that we can pin the blame on specific individuals – this is not true and would be counter-productive. What we should do instead is try to understand, take into account what we learn, and use this information to control the forces at work. I think that the nature of the West’s Covid response tells us a lot about how our so-called ‘Liberal Democracies’ work – we should take note of what these structural deficiencies are, for when real danger rears its ugly head, we can limit its excesses.

The Problems with Our Covid-19 Response

I think there are several problems with the way in which we have responded to Covid-19. I think the worst thing about the response is not the response itself but what people have conceived the response to be doing. What I mean by this is that it is accepted that it is almost self-evident that the aim of our lockdown is to stop the disease in its tracks. Those who do not agree are Beezlebub, stealing the souls of people before their time. I’m not saying that the lockdown may be good in some ways. It is almost certain that less people will die – at least in the short term – but, then again, at what cost? It is important that we weigh up the cost with the benefits before making this sort of massively consequential decision – and I don’t think we’re doing that.

The greatest fallacy that is currently being espoused is that we know nothing. We know nothing about this disease, and you, the informed citizen, certainly does not know enough to contribute to the debate about the response. This is what really annoys me. We see it all the time - when those people with a medical degree lecture us about how we are not qualified to talk about the virus and response. This is a democracy, and the democracy requires political debate. If those with a medical degree insist on cordoning off decision-making about this crisis to ‘the experts’ I don’t see the problem with doing the same with political decision-making generally. The fact is, the requirements of having a political debate still exist, and there is a political debate to be had. Even more so, it is really important that we do have a political debate – for the consequences of not doing so are that we botch our response, which could have massive long-term significance. The reason we should be having a debate is twofold. One, the information available to the public is perfectly acceptable enough. Two, there are trade-offs, and we, as the public, will have to undergo the consequences of these trade-offs – so at the minimum we should be able to consent or otherwise to something that affects us.

Ok, let’s start with what we know, because we do know quite a bit. The first piece of information is that the disease will go on for a long time. Why? Two reasons – one, because it takes a long time to develop a vaccine and two, because the disease is so infectious. This means that until we develop a vaccine it is likely that if we are trying to contain the virus, we will be playing a game of whack-a-mole. Every time the virus pops up, we will have to use the hammer of economic lockdown to temporarily stop it. It may work every time. The signs are good – China has all but eradicated the disease, and the differential of the epidemiological curves are decreasing in Italy and Spain. However, the signs in China and South Korea are also not good in some other, important regards. Despite controlling the virus, they have been unable to completely eradicate it, and in both, they remain in a state of semi-lockdown (or more accurately in South Korea, a state of self-enforced social distancing). This is how society will be following the ‘defeat’ of the virus - the new normal will be very different from what we had before.

In addition to this fact, we know some other things about the virus. We know that the virus infects and kills the elderly and vulnerable far, far more regularly and consistently than those who are neither. The death rate for those under 50 is probably just a bit higher than the average death rate for the flu. This is relatively high, but I do no not think, if we were to restrict Covid-19 to just this age group, it necessitates current levels of intervention.

The Socio-Economic Consequences of the Lockdown

The third thing we do know is the consequences of economic lockdown. They are really significant and often terrible. Not for you upper middle-class elites sitting at home acting as if this is an extended holiday – in fact it gives you time-poor people fantastic opportunities in a world where time is increasingly the rarest commodity. No, instead it puts immense pressure on both the poor and the state as a whole. Let’s deal with the poor first. Although the UK has largely dealt with a lot of these issues and passed them onto the state, I will discuss the problems as if this was not the case. Life is hard for many and life is very hard for some. The economic pressures associated with raising a family on low wages mean that a lot of people will struggle if economic lockdown occurs. People will lose their jobs – those who have barely or only just recovered from the financial crisis will therefore be unable to pay for what they deem to be the basic essentials of life. Those who are self-employed will lose work and lose progress. I could go on, for the consequences are as various as they are devastating. I think the biggest point, however, is the following – which compounds any aforementioned consequences massively (bared by the government or otherwise) - and makes this necessarily worse than recessions in some respects. In economic life, things are calculated in relation to the margin. The margin is the change of a variable – so if a company increases its profit by 5%, that is a marginal difference, i.e. it is a change from the current value. People think disaster when the difference between revenue and cost decreases, or the margin decreases. So, when not only the marginal income, but the total income disappears due to complete shutdown, the effect is much, much worse. This is the situation that we are dealing with.

But, as you will no doubt have pointed out – there is another way. Government debt. Really high government debt covering the costs of the wages of people who will be most affected. This seems sensible if your aim is to avoid massive and widespread hardship. Companies will not go bust and generally people will be able to cope. But again, at what cost? It seems that the government debt, already historically high, could skyrocket. We have spent 10 long and painful years reducing the deficit and debt in response to a perceived need to do so post-2010. Who knows what consequences this will have down the road? No one knows, but it cannot be healthy. Increased interest payments increase the deficit, the increase in deficit increases the debt. These interest payments are costly – we currently pay 5% of our taxes towards funding the debt we already have. High debt will also reduce the levers available in future financial crises – we no longer have that freedom to borrow as much as we used to. It will reduce the amount we can borrow to make significant economic domestic progress – that capital spending Boris and Cummings were going on about is harder when in debt. It is likely to worsen our credit rating, increasing the rate we borrow at. In essence, it will cause further economic malaise, further reducing our capacity for economic growth, and increasing our susceptibility to future crises. In addition to government debt, also likely is a long period of economic contraction and poor performance. As people stay at home, buying little, contributing little to the economy, both demand for products and supply contract. People stop working, so stop producing economic goods, increasing their cost, and reducing their availability. Economic output reduces, and so, therefore, does economic growth. All pretty obvious, right. This can cause people’s real incomes to decrease anyway – and although government intervention reduces the sting of it, even in 2008 massive government intervention could not deter recession. In this context, the poor still be affected in the way I previously outlined.

So, what have we established? Or (more accurately) what have I set up for you to conclude? Well, we have established the economic consequences will be massive, and will inevitably affect both the government and the poorest most. We also have information pointing to the fact that economic lockdown is probably effective, but only temporarily. We have also established that there are certain groups that are far less vulnerable than others. We also know that herd immunity also has substantial benefits – both avoiding the threat of a second wave and allowing us to immediately avoid all those terrible social and economic consequences. Ok, all that is fact. What conclusions do I draw? What I say now will not be my final conclusions in this blog post, but a preliminary step to understanding the complexities of the situation. I think that this information suggests that we should not use the lockdown to stop the virus, but instead to simultaneously ‘squash the sombrero’ and protect the most vulnerable. By doing this, we will delay the peak, and reduce the numbers in hospital at any one time. Both reducing the size of the peak and increasing the time to the peak gives the NHS time to increase capacity, gives NHS workers the time to recover from Covid-19 and allows the numbers in hospital at any one time to be below NHS capacity. What’s more, if we protect the vulnerable by cordoning them off from the rest of society, we will prevent a lot of deaths and gain herd immunity. This could protect us from the real danger of a Spanish flu-style mutation. This solution definitely has some advantages.

Some reasons why this is not perfect

Ok, for the sake of convenience I will call this the ‘sombrero’ solution. Believe me, this will be more convenient that describing it in detail every time it comes up. The ‘sombrero’ solution is flawed in a number of ways, but nevertheless I do not think it should necessarily be discounted.

I think that the major problem with devising a strategy like the ‘sombrero’ solution is that it lacks an essential flexibility and recognition that my assumptions could very well be wrong. No one is superhuman, no one no matter what they believe has catch-all solutions to anything. Although there are some additional reasons why in an emergency like this we need to be wary of the limited capacity of human reason, I think it can nevertheless give us some generalised lessons about political leadership and decision-making.

I have said that we definitely do – as the informed public - know some things, and there is some contention between competing visions of what we should do. These are the two conditions for public debate, meaning we have a moral obligation to do engage in one, because of the massive consequences of not doing so. However, some readers will have picked out a flaw. This is that we also know something else. Something that seems to contradict that first condition for public debate. That is that we know we have limited information.

This is true, but I do not think that it poses a problem at all. Two things need to be emphasised. The first is that we do actually know that we have limited information. In fact, it is knowledge of the fact that we have limited information that allows us to make an informed decision about what we should do. We can recognise the fact, for this recognition is the information that is ironically most vital in any response. The second thing to be emphasised is that in every decision we have limited information – we do not know everything about almost anything. So the way I have characterised this is potentially wrong. What we have here, specifically, is rapidly evolving information, not limited information. This is the crux of the problem. We should therefore have a solution that maximises our ability to react flexibly to changing circumstances and scientific consensus. A good example would be using lockdown to increase NHS capacity considerably. I think that the government has been somewhat effective in this with the building of new hospitals - the NHS Nightingales. However, it is clear that the economic cost of propping up the entire economy dwarfs the financial cost of building new hospitals by such a considerable margin, that it seems crazy not to invest more economic resources into it. It will be a massive unnecessary future burden if in 3 months’ time we have to prop up the entire economy because we have insufficient NHS capacity. I blame this on an underlying inability for British society (specifically the bureaucracy) to be ambitious in conceiving of solutions – aiming to use the tried to the untried.

I think that this ‘flexible’ solution is the best. We do not know, accurately, the case fatality rate – although we can have a pretty good guess. We do not know how it will affect countries in Africa and the Middle East. We do not know whether it will go away in the summer. We do not know how quickly the vaccine can be made. We do not know whether testing and mass surveillance are effective in the generality as in South Korea. I think that the ‘sombrero’ solution makes some assumptions we cannot afford to make right now. In the UK, especially, NHS capacity is historically low and there is too much uncertainty around the precise case fatality rate of Covid-19 as a virus to make a decision on how we should react. Buying time will enable us to simultaneously gain information and NHS capacity. I think that what’s more, we have very little choice (at least at the moment I am writing). The government has already committed to this path – it would be politically and financially infeasible to U-turn here.

Conclusion

Now the point of this article is to show that there is room for public debate on the question of how far we should take this. I hope I have showed that this is not just an ‘Economy vs Lives’ dilemma, and that support for the economy – specifically those in poverty and the government – is something that could be better long term than trying to expel the virus from the face of the planet. Although, given the significant uncertainties, we should not commit to prioritising the economy and therefore the functioning of society now – I see that sooner or later some variation on this will almost inevitably be the better solution. We cannot keep an economy in a perpetual state of non-production – it is neither sustainable nor worth it. It will cause massive hardship and years of anaemic growth as well as far greater susceptibility of total economic collapse.

I make a prediction, here, that governments will realise this. They will start, slowly, to change political priorities if they care about the general wellbeing in society. Maybe this will not happen, I very well could be wrong – but I think it is more likely than not that it will.

Yours,

WFF