We need to compare the short and long term costs and benefits. Instead of being buffaloed into only partially considered action.

I usually am in substantial agreement with Heather Mac Donald's arguments and do agree with select elements of this piece. However, I think she discounts some reasonably important context. The article is Compared to what? by by Heather Mac Donald.

Whenever you do problem solving, the biggest challenge is simply defining the problem itself. Everyone is in 80% agreement but all of them have some aspect of the problem which is, for them, the most critical. Until there is a collective agreement on the definition of the problem, then there is a substantial probability that we will solve the wrong problem, deploy an inappropriate solution and/or make the situation worse rather than better.

And this is the step everyone always wants to skip. What is the problem we are solving?

Once you have the definition, they usually then jump straight to the "obvious" solution. There is no effort to assess alternative approaches and most critically there is no examination of relative costs of solving the problem and no real effort to examine short term costs/benefits against long term costs/benefits.

We are eager to problem solve. So eager that we skip a lot of critical steps.

Once we have a defined problem and once we commit to examining alternate solutions, we then collect data for the who, what, why, where, when, how in order to put dimensions on the problem and dimensions on the solutions and demonstrate the causal linkage between the propose solution to the defined problem and the anticipated beneficial outcomes.

Of, course, when the problem is simple and causally obvious and the negative impact clear, when costs of solving are small and when solutions are easily reversed without too much detriment, such instinctual problem solving can work. Indeed, it should always be the first default approach.

The issue is that most problems are solved this way. Any problems which resist immediate resolution are likely complex, causally opaque, ill-defined, have a multiplicity of solutions and have complicated trade-off outcomes. They need some deep analysis and some form of enforced resolution.

So Mac Donald's Compared to what? is absolutely true. But she takes it in a different direction than I anticipated. When faced with novel complex and consequential problems, where solutions are expensive, path dependent, irreversible and when you have only one shot at solving the problem, you need to consider your preferred solution (and its costs and benefits) compared to alternate solutions. Instead, Mac Donald goes with:

Compared to what? That should be the question that every fear-mongering news story on the coronavirus has to start with. So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection. Twenty-two of those deaths occurred in one poorly run nursing home outside of Seattle, the Life Care Center. Another nine deaths occurred in the rest of Washington state, leaving ten deaths (four in California, two in Florida, and one in each of Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, and South Dakota) spread throughout the rest of the approximately 329 million residents of the United States. This represents roughly .000012 percent of the U.S. population.

It is important to maintain perspective but she is committing a category error. You cannot compare a novel, fast-moving and little understood virus to a stable system of error.

By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019, the National Safety Council estimates. That represents an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day; if the press catalogued these in as much painstaking detail as they have deaths from coronavirus, highways nationwide would be as empty as New York subways are now. Even assuming that coronavirus deaths in the United States increase by a factor of one thousand over the year, the resulting deaths would only outnumber annual traffic deaths by 2,200. Shutting down highways would have a much more positive effect on the U.S. mortality rate than shutting down the U.S. economy to try to prevent the spread of the virus.

Her central argument is valid. In the face of the unknown, there are costs and dangers from the unknown threat, and there are costs and dangers from the reaction to the threat. Panic buying has not just first- but expensive second-order effects as well.

In a phase where quick and decisive action is required but when there is no algorithm of response based on deep knowledge and experience, costs will be incurred one way or another and it will be some years before we have clarity as to which approach worked the best in both the short and long term.

And yes we need to maintain perspective. But we don't obtain that by comparing the unknown (Corona virus) to the known (traffic fatalities). That is a category error.

But the central point she is making is correct. We don't know what we are dealing with and mass speculation and in particular, efforts to gin up a panicked response are deeply irresponsible and will be destructive.

Is closing down and self-isolation the right response? Maybe. We don't know. Clearly it was not required in Taiwan and Singapore.

Her unstated call is to heed Bastiat's warning. To every issue there is the seen and the unseen and we need to pay attention to both.

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, — at the risk of a small present evil.

Maybe shutting down and self-isolating for two weeks is the best solution. Maybe it breaks the back of the spread of Covid-19 and if that happens then maybe we will have saved some estimated number of saved lives. Maybe.

But we are also likely to shrink national productivity by 5% for the year. On a twenty trillion dollar economy, picking shut down and isolation for two weeks means we become $1 trillion poorer.

Perhaps that is a worthwhile price to pay. But compared to what? What were the alternative solutions and their cost/benefit structures? The press does not pay attention to that at all and merely use limited and flawed arguments to play partisan games.

And if we shrink the economy by a trillion dollars, who pays and who benefits. People lose their jobs. Fragile families will unravel. Individuals may take drastic mortal chances or actions. There will be some number of deaths associated with a rapidly shrunk economy and those costs and deaths are going to be more concentrated in some groupings than others.

To consider alternative solutions, to estimate short and long term costs and benefits. To consider who pays and who benefits. To define exactly what it is that we are solving. All those are good things. But that is not quite what she is saying.

Those in the press who are trying to gin up panic for their own commercial interests and benefit? To score cheap political points? There a too many of those profoundly unserious and unethical individuals. A pox on them.

UPDATE: And as if on cue.

I should be qualified to comment on the covid-19 pandemic. I'm a computational/system biologist working on infectious diseases and have spent five years in a world class 'pandemic response modelling' unit. In this thread, I will summarise what I believe I (don't) know. (1/12)

— Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) March 14, 2020

Click for the thread.