Covid-19 law and policies is a lagging variable to citizen choices

From Americans stopped the economy, not politicians. And we will restart it by Ed Forbes.

As the various states and localities continue to develop plans for opening up their economies from the COVID-19 lockdowns, we need to think carefully about what it means to “restart” an economy, and, more fundamentally, what exactly constitutes “the economy.”

The rhetoric from Washington, D.C. and the state capitals is that the president and the various governors have it within their power to restart their economies. And in some cases, we see even more local levels of government asserting that such a restart is within their purview. In one sense, they are all correct: lifting the legal constraints they have all put in place is a necessary condition for the resumption of economic activity.

But doing is not sufficient to ensure the restart they desire. The only people who can really restart the economy are us. Only when we — All Americans — decide that we are comfortable with resuming various kinds of economic activity because we believe it to be safe will that activity happen. You can open the cage door, but that does not mean the animal will come out.

Politicans and the media (not to mention economists) too often treat the economy as if it were some giant machine with various dials and buttons that can be pushed to produce particular results. So if we just push the “restart” button, the machine will come to life. Economies, however, are not machines. They are much more like human ecosystems with all of the connections, complications, and unpredictability such systems contain. Understanding how economies operate has to begin with understanding human choices and the constraints under which we choose.

In the case of the lockdowns, it is important to realize that people were out in front of closing down the economy. The evidence is pretty clear that we began withdrawing well before governments at all levels turned practice into legal decrees. Schools, restaurants, gyms, and houses of worship began to close or move to virtual before they were mandated to do so. Cell phone data indicate that people began to practice social distancing and forms of quarantine before governments acted.

We stopped the economy, not the politicians. And we will restart it.

Agree. This is the point I have been making that the legal niceties of quarantines are to a significant degree independent of citizen behavior. Sweden has left the decision as to degree of quarantining up to individual citizens. No one is locked down but a very large percentage of the population has elected to self-quarantine.

In the US, we have virtually every permutation. Populations which chose to self-distance before anything official was announced. Populations which stayed mobile despite official lockdowns. Populations which adhered to lockdowns only when they were enforced. Etc.

And most of the analytical research I am seeing so far shows no correlation between case rates and quarantine announcements. That may change in a year or two as measurements and definitions get more accurate but based on what we can see now, it appears that the case for lockdowns is weak.

Forbes's article though crystalizes an insight which was vague to me. We have been broadly focusing on experts and treatments and strategies for containment, etc. as if this is inherently and perhaps only a deterministic, statist problem. The media has been treating this as if it were a deterministic engineering problem with a deterministic engineering style solution.

I keep talking about emergent order, and civil rights, and targeted quarantines, etc. And yet I had not focused till now on causation. A linkage which Forbes's article is a catalyst to acknowledging.

The patterns of citizen behaviors have been treated as a function of what the government allows as manifested in its various lockdown orders. I suspect that it is the wrong way to look at it.

There are two reasonably independent variables which none-the-less have influence on one another. The first variable is that citizens discern danger and determine what their chosen response should be. Part of their determination is influenced by government policy and "expert" opinions, but ultimately the distilled decision of how individual citizens decide to behave in this period of elevated danger and profound uncertainty resides with them. And it may or may not be correlated with what the State determines is best.

Similarly, the State makes its decisions on how to address the profound unknowns of the new danger based on its own complex balancing of multiple goals, constraints, and interests. Citizen sentiment is in the mix but to some degree a limited factor under most contexts.

So citizens decide, the State decides, each is to some small degree an input to the other.

And what we see is that the profile of demonstrated behaviors is primarily depended on the choices of free citizens and not of State decisions. We have been assuming that where people have reduced their mobility, it must be because they chose to comply with the State decisions.

In reality, there is a lot of emerging evidence that people made their decisions and the State made its decisions and they are only loosely correlated.

Citizens in many states constrained their mobility well in advance of lockdowns. In several states, just as in Sweden, even though there were only moderate quarantines, and even some without any lockdowns, citizens chose to constrain their mobility. And we are now seeing citizen mobility accelerate in advance of any changes in the laws.

We are interpreting changed mass behavior as a function of State decisions and the evidence actually seems to suggest that changed mass behavior occurred independent of State decisions. It appears that State decisions are only modestly related to manifested citizen behaviors and choices.

In which case, if true, the mainstream media obsession with strategies and plans and laws is all a chimera.

Figure out what the citizens are thinking. Ignore the Mandarin Class and their obsessions.

Given that journalists are part of the Mandarin Class bubble, that won't occur, but it is still an interesting change in focus.

And there is an irony in there as well. The mainstream media, were it held in high regard and had a reputation for unbiased and comprehensive reporting, would be in an ideal position to actually exert some influence on the citizen decisions. But they have come far adrift and no longer have those attributes and therefore have much reduced, perhaps even minimal influence any longer. Perhaps much of the fear-mongering and hysteria is not simply a product of partisan and ideological spleen. Perhaps it is a product of the mismatch between click-bait journalism and real citizen knowledge and choices.