Did statist euphoria, when offered the pretext of a pandemic, lead to irrational and destructive public health decisions?

A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith.  A short but enjoyable treatise.  He has a dry, acerbic, understated humor.  He starts with some of core episodes covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay and adds 19th and 20th century panics.  

Galbraith identifies a common qualitative pattern for financial panics.

1. Cheap money (low interest rates) with high leverage (debt)

2. Plausible (but not true) reason for inflated valuation

3. Irrationally exuberant expectations of future return (greed)

4. Conviction that it is different this time 

5.     Representation of financial genius by the purveyors of euphoria

6. Certainty of superior knowledge ("I'll get out before the peak")

7. Crash

8. Search for those to blame

His advice is to be vigilant in spotting the pattern and then act accordingly.  Easier said than done.

What struck me reading the book was that his pattern extends beyond the financial.  All his cases are financial but euphoria can manifest in many ways.  Money is one manifestation of power.  Might there also be euphoric episodes in the exercise of power aside from the financial aspect?  I suspect so.  

Specifically, what if euphoria is the underpinning condition for all the bad public health decisions of the past two years?  Did statist euphoria, when offered the pretext of a pandemic, lead to irrational and destructive public health decisions?

Switching Galbraith's model into a more generalized form, we would have:

1. Perceived threat to individual and collective well-being (pandemic, war, terrorism, poverty, crime, civil disturbance, etc.)

2. Plausible (but not true) reason for the inflated panic

3. Irrationally exuberant expectations of public policy effectiveness

4. Conviction that this time is different from the past

5.     Representation of expertise by the purveyors of panic

6. Certainty of superior knowledge ("Just one more public sacrifice will get us there")

7. Unavoidable evidence of failure

8. Search for those to blame

 

Mapping that model to the Covid-19 Pandemic response seems a pretty good fit.  And we certainly seem to be entering stage 7 with stage 8 to follow soon.  The Swedish, UK, Danish, and Israeli data, far superior to our own, seem to confirm what has been suspected by many all along.

Zero Covid was a mistaken policy approach

Masks were a failure

Lockdowns were a destructive failure

Ignoring treatment approaches was a costly error

Failure to measure and experiment was a costly error

Vaccine mandates were damaging failures

Vaccine passports were damaging failures 

School Shutdowns were damaging failures

Vaccines have a dramatically shorter shelf life than anticipated

Vaccines do not stop contagion

Vaccines might not be mitigating impact

OAS might be more consequential than anticipated

Failure to recognize the two-week immune suppression after the first jab probably cost lives

Basically, our public health policy "experts" when faced with decisions, seem to have pretty consistently made the wrong decisions, ignoring both current data and past knowledge.  This is understandable in the first three months, possibly even the first six months.  But since the summer of 2020, the evidence against the above approaches has been reasonably compelling.  

Why did the "experts" stick with their bad decisions?  For the same reason that investors get caught up in a financial euphoria.  Both of them are convinced of future benefits, the one in terms of dollars and the other in terms of power and prestige, regardless of the absence of evidence to support their convictions.  

Seems plausible.