Democracy under threat from the darkness of incompetence

Heh.  Well, sort of.  This is actually kind of astonishing.  

My latest in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/w6GIOEMhZv

— ProfEmilyOster (@ProfEmilyOster) October 31, 2022

Professor Oster is an economics professor at Brown University and claims to unapologetically data-driven.  I have followed her work for a number of years now.  She tends to blog and tweet for the young mother's audience but she has some good work.  But her intellectual creds have taken a hit during the Covid-19 pandemic.  

She has followed the government line and endorsed almost all the otherwise indefensible positions of the past three years in terms of school closures, masks, vaccine mandates, etc.  All of which went against the pre-pandemic response plan as well against past practice and emerging data.

And that was probably the greatest sin of the past two years.  As more and more data became available demonstrating why the bad decisions had been bad, even given the knowledge limitations of the time, Oster became increasingly resistant to the new data.  Her default seemed to be, well, government knows best.  For a public intellectual it was a shameful position.

And now she is asking that all the political leaders, the agency leaders, the academics and the public intellectuals who were dramatically and vociferously wrong and who exacted grave consequences on both citizens and on those who spoke honestly from data and experience.  It is one thing to be wrong.  It is quite another to be maliciously and vengefully wrong.

I presume this might have been some sort of trial ballon by the clerisy.  If so, I suppose it was worth floating.  Currently 83% of respondents are panning the idea (in terms of how badly the article is being ratioed.)  1,751 snarky comments versus 365 hearts.  

Our public intellectuals are all for melodramatic claims that Democracy Dies in Darkness.  But when it comes to responsibility and accountability to their fellow citizens upon whom the inflicted the evil of their wrongness, there is a desperate plea for some more darkness.  "Can't we all let bygones be bygones since we were so maliciously wrong?" just isn't cutting it with the denizens of Twitter.  

There has been no accountability so far and when the threat of Monkey Pox came along, exactly the same players seemed willing to commit exactly the same mistakes.  Again!

Time to establish some responsibility, accountability, and consequences to blithe public intellectuals who do harm to their fellow citizens.  

UPDATE:  As might have been expected, el gato malo who was a bastion of sensibleness throughout the pandemic is not, uh, especially receptive to Oster's plea for redemption.  From emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea by el gato malo.  He reminds that Oster repeatedly over the past 36 months would gather the data together on a subject, sort of acknowledge that the data did not support the CDC policy, and then make excuses and support the bad policy anyway.