“I am … inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of Hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.”
F. A. Hayek, 1974 Nobel Prize lecture
Forgive me for how precious-sounding this is, but: If you really want to understand COVID politics in the United States, you have to unwind American political history all the way back to 1776—and a bit before, getting to know that character who shouldn’t exist but somehow does: the conservative revolutionary.
COVID unleashed a lot of different kinds of crazy in the United States, and, on the right, it broke the dam for a special kind of crazy, the kind that leads to the embrace of crackpots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.
Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.
In the past few decades, we have seen a collection of episodes—9/11 and its global aftermath, the 2008 financial crisis and the Tea Party movement that grew out of it, the COVID controversies, January 6—that could be understood either as a series of progressively radicalizing events for the Right or, conversely, as an endless and repetitious acting out of that great American contradiction, politically of a piece with everything from the Jacksonian opposition to the central bank to southern secession to George Wallace and enraged populist opposition to the Civil Rights Movement (the right should not in this sense be thought of as synonymous with the Republican Party) to the Ross Perot phenomenon in the 1990s to the rise of Donald Trump.
As an identifiable and discrete political phenomenon, the American conservative movement might locate its beginning to the publication of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, a populist attack on the Ivy League written by a moneyed aristocrat from Connecticut, young and Yale-educated and not at all uninterested in making a name for himself. Buckley in the volume heaped scorn on elite institutions, argued that those at the top of such institutions were abusing their positions for self-interested reasons, rejected “the superstitions of ‘academic freedom’” as his subtitle had it, and was deeply skeptical of claims of expertise when those claims came from quarters unaligned with his values and interests: From the beginning, the right was ready for COVID.
And so was the left, in its way, and the journalist David Zweig documents that in his new book, An Abundance of Caution. While the right descended from the realms of propriety—mainline Protestantism, the Chamber of Commerce, the country clubs—into 1968-style paranoia and nihilism, progressives passed them on the opposite side of the road, having completed that “long march through the institutions” and installed progressive allies at the commanding heights of culture, media, business, education—power. The left’s irreconcilable contradiction, which you can see personified in the vicious young Hamas champions at Columbia University, comes from the marriage of adversarial protest culture to the facts of life at the top of the org chart: When Ivy League students denounce Ivy League administrators, that is a left-on-left struggle session, with conservatives on the sidelines. But the Trump administration’s bungled response to COVID gave progressives a way to keep all of those feet, in Birkenstocks and in sensible managers’ brogues, marching in the same direction: The hysterical progressive overreaction to COVID served the left’s vestigial need to denounce and to protest, while also serving the progressive desire to submit themselves to the management of empowered experts and to require the submission of others to that expert management. “Liberals, who had long been disgusted by the president, now found their disgust metastasized into fear- and indignation-driven rage,” Zweig writes. “A new, contagious virus was circulating in the country and the guy in charge, a paragon of wishful thinking and unseriousness, was going to cause unnecessary mayhem and harm and deaths. As in any classic story, an antipode to the villain was needed.” He identifies that heroic as being filled initially by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, “projecting a paternalistic, calming authority,” but the hero ended up being a collective one: paternalistic, calming authority itself, along with all of its most telegenic vessels and sources.
Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers. Those problems include: overreliance on mathematical models that can be tweaked for ideological ends where empirical observation and measurement provide insufficient support for the preferred policy—or would militate against it if taken into account; the fetishization of technology in education, very nicely illustrated by Bill Clinton, ensorcelled by the apparent early promise of the classroom internet, repeating almost verbatim identical claims that had been made about radio in its infancy—and that were made about film and television as well; the moronizing effects of reflexive political tribalism—there was a time when the Trump campaign could complain, with some reason, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were working to “undermine the public’s confidence in the coming coronavirus vaccine,” ironic as that complaint is to read today with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Cabinet; the related self-censorship of the media in the service of narrow partisan interests and dogmatic progressivism; and misalignment of incentives, with policymakers (disproportionately progressive-leaning) captured by special interests (notably Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions) and thence producing policy agendas that did not serve the public interest, a situation that would be familiar enough to anybody who had ever read a few pages of F. A. Hayek or James Buchanan.
(I mean the public-choice economist, not the 15th president.)
About that final point: Reading An Abundance of Caution is a little bit like reading Ezra Klein in the past few years, as ladies and gentlemen of the sort who write for the New Yorker seem to discover phenomena that have been at the center of the liberal-libertarian critique of progressivism for a century or so. When it comes to housing supply, for example, Klein and Matt Yglesias have even discovered that regulation has unintended consequences! You won’t find Hayek’s essays or The Calculus of Consent in Zweig’s index, and, what’s worse, you won’t find very much evidence that the author has read such works—which he should have, given the light a century’s accumulation of economic and political literature might have shed on his subject. (Also: He’s very soft on progressive education reformer John Dewey, so he’s lucky I’m reviewing the book and not Jonah Goldberg, who reacts strongly to the name.) The 2020s have been, for libertarians, a time of watching the unseemly spectacle of our friends on the left learning the most elementary things in public and the somewhat sorrier spectacle of our friends on the right forgetting what little they had learned, or had pretended to learn, about the epistemic problems of central planning and—most directly relevant to Zweig’s work—“the pretense of knowledge,” as Hayek famously put it.
Because it is, of course, the pretense of knowledge that Zweig really is writing about, particularly when it comes to such considerations as mathematical modeling. As Hayek remarked in his Nobel Prize lecture, economists and other social scientists suffer from envy of the physical sciences. They attempt to imitate the methods of the physical sciences, but there is a problem with their doing so:
Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.
It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.
And, of course, the ladies and gentlemen managing the COVID response would have done well to consider Hayek’s great maxim: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Which might help the author understand how, for example, Imperial College London’s influential epidemic model, produced by Prof. Neil Ferguson, loomed so large while being so thin:
Ferguson’s model assumed that 37 percent of transmission occurs in schools and workplaces, with schools having twice the transmission rate as workplaces. These figures are very important—they are the basis of the model, and the foundation of its projections about the effect of school closures. So, where did Ferguson get these figures? The answer is not in the main paper. To find the source of the figure one has to spelunk deep into the paper’s supplement, where you would discover the following text:
“It is necessary to make assumptions about the proportion of transmission which occurs in schools and workplaces, as data do not exist. … Our assumption is that 37% of transmission occurs in these contexts, with the within-school transmission coefficient being twice that of the within-workplace coefficient. However, this choice is arbitrary.” If you need to take a moment to let the previous sentences sink in, I understand. When I first found this passage I felt like a cartoon character rubbing his eyes at seeing a mirage. I had to read it three times before I believed it was real.
Many of our progressive friends have figured out that the “expertise” put into force during the pandemic was in fact fallible. But when it comes to federally directed green-energy boondoggles or Washington-based management of the housing market—or similar intrusions in education, or health care, or much else—they do not seem quite prepared to apply the lessons they have learned more generally.
Mathematical modeling led the public health authorities and self-interested politicians to support suboptimal and, at times, even idiotic COVID mitigation policies. But that is hardly the end of the story. Consider the prominence of mathematical modeling in the climate debate. There are real questions (far beyond my competence to work through) about climate models themselves, but climate policy involves modeling more than the climate itself. For example, many claims about reduced energy use in supposedly “green” buildings are based on mathematical models that have no direct observable relationship to the real-world energy use in those buildings. Models of “embodied carbon” in building materials (and other consumer goods) are by nature arbitrary and incomplete, and reliably fail to take account of second-order market effects. (E.g.: Preventing U.S.-based power plants from burning coal could easily turn out to be bad for greenhouse-gas emissions globally, because lower demand from relatively clean U.S. plants reduces price pressure on coal, encouraging consumption by operators of relatively dirty plants in China, India, etc.) And a great deal of our economic policy debate (as about minimum-wage laws) is shaped by mathematical modeling that cannot be empirically evaluated, because doing so would require a comparison between measurable outcomes and non-measurable counterfactuals.
I write this not because I’m interested in side cases, but because I believe the overall context—the habits of American thinking about public affairs—is necessary for understanding what went wrong with COVID and why it is likely, if not inevitable, that we will repeat the mistakes every time we are faced with a similar episode of social stress. Zweig writes: “One thing is clear: the school closures and broader harms unnecessarily and unfairly inflicted upon America’s children were overdetermined.” An overdetermined effect is one that has more than one cause. The COVID mess is largely behind us—but the mess behind the mess, the ur-mess, remains. Those overdetermining factors are likely to create similar pathways to error in very different kinds of policy contexts.
The book is published by the MIT Press, a major academic publisher, so it is of course incompetently edited, and the prose is dreadful in places—i.e., about average for a book of this type in our time. (Cuomo “wore a dark navy suit with a crimson tie and crisp white shirt. He sat erect. His tie had a perfect knot, and hung perfectly centered. The lines of his jacket’s lapels formed a tight V down his torso and angled at the top to shoulder pads that jutted stiffly outward like the wing serifs in the Van Halen logo.” Ye gods.) The subtitle is American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, and while there were a lot of destructive and costly policies imposed in response to COVID, this book is, as advertised, almost exclusively about school closures. The author is a father and plainly was annoyed—and pained, and worried—by what his own children went through. The damage done will probably last a long time, if not a lifetime, for children whose lives were disrupted by an extraordinary degree of isolation and inactivity during the COVID shutdowns, and it is natural that the situation of children should rise to the top of our concerns. But other changes—including the further aggrandizement of federal executive power, the precedent of extraordinary economic interventions, massive government spending and a large increase in public debt, inflation, etc.—may in the end prove more destructive. And all of those factors will interact in complex ways with the radicalization of the right noted in the opening section of this review.
From time to time, I will speak to someone who has undergone a midlife political transformation and ask him about what happened to make that come to pass. I am surprised by how many times I have heard conservative men say that they were radicalized—some even use the word radicalized—by the Brett Kavanaugh affair, in which Democrats attempted to personally ruin a Supreme Court nominee by means of bizarre and outlandish claims of sexual misdeeds he supposedly engaged in, some of them as a minor, depravities that were almost certainly wholly invented and unquestionably invented in part. It was a gross and contemptible affair, but if you have made it to 40 or 50 and have been paying attention to American politics, even casually, you’ve seen a lot of that sort of thing. Some people are just walking around in the world—or scrolling through Facebook—looking for a reason to get radicalized. They already have attained the necessary emotional state, and what remains is to fixate on a defensible pretext.
But 9/11 wasn’t like that. The financial crisis wasn’t like that. January 6 wasn’t like that.
And COVID wasn’t like that, either, though it is easy to get carried away with criticisms that are generally well-founded. At one point in his book, Zweig marvels and despairs that certain public health authorities are staffed disproportionately by people who describe themselves as risk-averse, as though this disproportionality were somehow self-evidently a problem in and of itself. I have written a good deal about variation in personal and group risk aversion as a factor in our public life, and I believe it is an underappreciated motive factor in our politics. But it will not do to treat attitudes toward risk at variance with one’s own as obviously mistaken—or, really, even as mistaken at all: People are allowed to decide for themselves how they feel about risk, whether the subject is a potentially (if rarely) dangerous infectious disease such as COVID or investing in securities when saving for retirement or taking out a variable-rate mortgage. Better public policies would allow more people to organize their lives in ways that reflect their own risk tolerance—except for the niggling fact that this also requires a community with the discipline to allow those who would enjoy the rewards of high risk tolerance to also bear its costs, which we Americans have been patently unwilling to do for a generation. People who find it difficult to be libertarians when it comes to the health insurance market are unlikely to take a libertarian approach to an epidemic. The results of the 2024 election very strongly suggest that Americans want to be micromanaged, that they desire to have an all-powerful leader who will tell them from whom they may buy a pair of flip-flops and whose flip-flops are verboten, or at least taxed to bits.
Mass democracy is a petri dish, and what grows in it is stupidity, a virus far more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2. We have the means to contain it—and to let democracy play its natural and necessary role as part of a healthy political ecosystem—but we are facing an epidemic, and our defenses are being overrun.
