THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ENDING THE HOUSE ARRESTS.

Today, a look at those building societal pressures.  Matt Purple suggests there's a public patience curve, and public officials have broken it. "People will only tolerate lockdowns for so long. By overstepping, some governors have accelerated the inevitable."  He notes,

We’re in the midst of our greatest public health crisis since the Spanish Flu and quarantine measures are absolutely necessary to abate the contagion. Still, state leaders can help stretch out that curve by avoiding overreach.

The governors who are having the most trouble are the ones having trouble taking "yes" for an answer. That is, the people began taking quarantine measures before the governors acted, the observed cases and deaths occurred, but in magnitudes far less than those that would overwhelm the hospitals and clinics, and instead of thinking about ways to offer some time off for good behavior, the governors extended their orders.  Not the kind of sensible official Mr Purple is hoping for.  "Now is the time for sensible statesmen who balance the overwhelming mandate for social distancing with the need for a little breathing room. If they choose instead to swing the sledgehammer, they’ll only knock that curve further down."

Reason's Matt Purple gives thought to the ways in which good behavior might be rewarded.  First, the keep-the-house-arrest-going case might be too much wishful thinking for the Openers, people who run the gamut from favoring a little more breathing room to the hard core Question Experts cohort.

Openers think it reasonable to consider that we are not facing a choice to "save lives" (or delay deaths) in the sense of preventing infections from ever occurring, which is more or less impossible now. The only really important consideration now is excess deaths or serious illness complications caused by inadequate medical facilities because at some given day in some specific hospital COVID cases are overwhelmingly large.

Openers thus wonder why more public policy decisions aren't being made based on a rigorous calculation of that number, now and in a reasonably foreseeable future based on best understanding of our hospital capacity, how quickly we could increase that capacity if that became public policy priority one, and the prevalence, percentage symptomatic, and percentage brought to brink of death by the disease. Openers tend to believe a "testing" solution or a "vaccine" solution are both outside the realm of plausibility now and for any foreseeable future.

On the other hand, advocates of staying the course, who also run the gamut from sticking with the thirty days to slow the spread to hard core close-it-up-until-there's-a-vaccine have their own idea of a loss function.

Closers are also sure that we can't know how much damage COVID-19 will eventually cause in our nation just based on the experience of the past 6 weeks, when we have been doing our best to keep people from getting close enough to each other in large enough numbers to truly and quickly unleash COVID-19. Thus to the Closers, any calculations based on "existing data" that are supposed to settle the question of whether we've done enough, or even too much, and can now "open up" are beside the point, in a genuinely dangerous way. If it's not an intolerable nightmare yet, they would say, that's because we are staying shut down.

The damage done by the disease and/or the policy reaction to the disease is baked into our nation, and will almost certainly echo strongly through at least the rest of this decade. Our nation might be slightly better off, though, if more of us did not compound that civic damage through a ferocious and unmanageable cultural and political squabble based on refusing to consider the reasons the other side thinks what they do with anything approaching intellectual charity and empathy.

It's in that last sentence, though, that the roots of populist rage emerge.  For the past sixty years, daily life has been an unending cultural and political squabble, sometimes over things of substance, but more frequently over things of little import, and that squabbling is making working the current problem more difficult.  Here's Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds for USA Today.  "People don’t appreciate being condescended to and bossed around, especially when the leaders ask them for sacrifices without empathy and humility."  Although he's probably more on the side of the Openers than the Closers, his diagnosis is on point.

Ultimately, this rising resentment is itself a failure of public health, and of public health administration. You can complain that people are irrational and resentful, that they don’t “believe in science,” or whatever. But people are what they are, and their response to epidemics is surprisingly predictable. If your messaging — and your behavior — inspires resentment that causes people to resist and ignore public health messages, then you have failed at your job, whatever the amount of scientific knowledge you bring to bear.

Sadly, to succeed in their job, our leaders will need to possess humility, empathy and self-discipline. Those traits are in sadly short supply in our leadership class. We will all pay a price for that, though if recent history is any guide, our leaders will pay less than the rest of us.

We'll hear from the populists themselves in the next installment.