THE POLITICIAN'S IMPLICIT LOSS FUNCTION THEOREM.

That's what politicians have, even if they don't specify it and evaluate the power of their policies against Type I and Type II errors.  But being a pundit evidently means you can read into politicians acting on what they're implicitly weighing in such a way that riles up your base.  Chris Hayes tried to dunk on Our President, for instance.

“The most cynical interpretation of all this, one I can’t quite bring myself to accept,” wrote Hayes, “is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that # and take a vicotry(sic) lap when ‘only’ tens of thousands died.”

That "sic" is Mediaite's Caleb Howe, attempting to document the dunking, as well as Mr Hayes's subsequent "But I really meant to say" clarifications.

In his subsequent replies, the defensive Hayes attempted to mitigate the conspiratorial tone, perhaps in the hope of softening the implicit indictment of Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who likewise touted and and described the models and charts at length to the American people.

“I think I’d distinguish between the integrity of the model and the good faith reasons for them using,” he wrote in a reply, “the macabre strangeness of it as this very explicit benchmark of ‘success’ that he articulates over and over as thousands of ppl die.” Between the things he was distinguishing between was a parenthetical. The good faith reasons “(which I don’t actually really question)” he wrote, now that he was done questioning them in his tweet that had, at the time of this post, 3,700 retweets and almost 15k likes. (By comparison, his hastily inserted, sorta-kinda walk-back had 1 retweet and 14 likes. Not 14k. Fourteen.)

Team Twitchy, predictably, is less kind.

Power Line's John Hinderaker grasps that there is a loss function.

Hayes has been widely denounced for floating a conspiracy theory. But what some call conspiracy, I call politics. Did politicians know that early estimates were wildly off base? It depends on what the meaning of “know” is. And, actually, President Trump set the bar at a reasonable level when he referred to 100,000 deaths. That is far lower than some of the early projections.

Hayes, given his partisan orientation, confined his speculation to the Trump administration. But what about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are poised to claim credit for limiting COVID-19 fatalities? Here in Minnesota, our governor preposterously alleged that absent his actions, there would be 74,000 deaths in our state. The actual count, as last recorded by Scott: 39. Do you think any Democratic governor or mayor will fail to take credit for lives allegedly saved?

All incumbents, regardless of party, share a common interest in citing bad model predictions and claiming credit for the models’ failure to describe reality. No doubt self-isolation measures have helped to some degree, but it will be easy for politicians to give their policies credit for what largely is attributable to models that were wrong in the first place, just like prior models for prior epidemics.

Politicians quickly figured out that there was little down-side to taking harsh, economy-killing measures. They could be blamed for doing too little, when the inevitable deaths occurred, but who would blame them for doing too much? As the feckless Andy Cuomo said, if we save just one life, destroying our economy and devastating the lives of millions is worth it.

That is, until people start asking whether the consequences to the lives of the healthy yet unemployed, or confined to quarters in a less-than-happy-family begin to outweigh the gains from taming the contagion.

Augustana of South Dakota's Robert E. Wright reinforces that point: making policy based on worst-case scenarios might make a lot of sense, particularly where there's some popular sovereignty and people who pretend they're doing a heckuvajob when the facts suggest otherwise don't last long in elected office.

Specifically, if politicians do not act and the novel coronavirus burns out, like some epidemiologists argue it would anyway, the world is pretty much unchanged and a “serious crisis” is left unexploited. If politicians remain inactive and the stench from the crematoria make the living long for death themselves, well, then, there will be hell to pay at the polls, or the poles.

If politicians act and the outcome is good, they can take credit and campaign on it for re-election, as many former military officers on both sides did by “waving the bloody shirt” of the Civil War for decades afterwards. A big win in other words.

If they act and the outcome is bad (i.e. if lots of people die) and again this is round one of the way politicians think, they can always portray it as a (comparatively) good come out with the refrain that “it’s a good thing we did something or this would have been much worse.” Some people will accept, while others reject, the validity of the statement—probably along party lines, so the expected outcome is better than in either of the two inaction squares.

I'd carp that "waving the bloody shirt" is anachronistic, as you still have people of a technocratic bent invoking the New Deal or Great Society or Civil Rights as the case for their Suitability to Rule.  I also suggest that you read the full essay, as what he has to say about what comes next, namely, we're in uncharted territory when it comes to balancing a safe restart against continued shutdowns.  Keep in mind, though, that the controversy over the excessively high initial forecasts of deaths is in part a recognition of individual rationality at work.  How many people might have observed the developments from China and Italy and laid in a few extra household supplies and cans of food, and dialed back on the travelling and participating in community festivals before the official orders took effect?  Likewise, how many people might weigh the evidence on the easing up of confinement orders and behave more prudently than officialdom endorses?

I'll give Legal Insurrection's Leslie Eastman the final word.

I assert that it is not a “conspiracy theory” when people fail to comprehend explanations that are unclear, vague, out of context, or not presented in a manner that can be readily understood. The failing belongs on the shoulders of the explainers. In my view, they are the media and the scientific members of the Task Force.

Or, as we counsel aspiring university teachers, " if you can't explain it to your mother-in-law, you don't understand it well enough."  The stakes are pretty high: if public officials, whether in the White House, state Capitols, or the various city halls, can't make clear what the exit strategy looks like, and what the benchmarks are, their failure to do so will lead to civil disobedience, and, just like any other exponential process, it will be just a little at first, then all at once.