Exactly because it is so obvious, it highlights the frequently brutal power relations that public choice scholars shove under the carpet when they talk about the “public”

A good discussion of a little discussed but highly important issue - what does the public really want? From “Public” choice
by Henry. While raised in the Covid-19 context, this is an age-old issue. Asking people in surveys whether they like or do not like something is reasonably meaningless. What we really want to know is their willingness to make specific trade-offs. Everyone likes mass transit in surveys as long as everyone else uses it to free up the highways. Their liking of mass transit has no implication that they, the respondents, will themselves actually use mass transit; as so many municipalities have discovered.

People have highly variant objectives and assumptions and without insight to those we can little interpret binary answers to out-of-context questions.

So here’s my bet. If the public choice analysis is right, and this is about some kind of broad and diffuse “public” pushing back against impossible regulations, then we will see a return to the economy sooner rather than later. But we can reasonably presume that this return will be roughly symmetric. People in general want to go back to work, they are voting with their feet to go back to work, and it’s just lefties and handwringing left-liberals who are oblivious to this.

In contrast, if I’m right, we will see a very different return to “normality.” The return to the economy will be sharply asymmetric. Those who are on the wrong end of private power relations – whether they are undocumented immigrants, or just the working poor – will return early and en masse. Those who have the choice and the bargaining power will tend instead to pick safety. They will be less likely to return to the workplace when they can work from home, they will go back later when they do go back, and when they do return to the workplace, they will make radical demands for changes that protect them.

You might object that this is an unfair bet, because it’s obvious that I’m picking the side that is going to win. That’s actually the point. Exactly because it is so obvious, it highlights the frequently brutal power relations that public choice scholars shove under the carpet when they talk about the “public” wanting an end to lockdown and a return to past economic relations. Intellectual programs that are designed from the ground up to assume government failure and private efficiency are terribly suited to understanding how many private relationships in fact work. There are places where public choice can be helpful in understanding aspects of the coronavirus response. Perhaps you might, e.g., apply it to the relationship between drug companies and regulators, and the ways in which intellectual property rules might hurt the search for a vaccine. That might or might not be helpful. But what is not helpful is its application as a theory of why “the public” is resisting a set of measures that the evidence suggests are actually highly popular with the public. Here, it’s more likely to mystify than to clarify.

Indeed.