Should pundits who missed the pandemic be fired?
I didn't warn you about COVID-19 in time. Is that grounds for my resignation?
Waiting for Colonel Tharp
Be seated.
LtCol Tharp will address us presently.
His deadline is tomorrow. Sunday, at the latest.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to keep you entertained—morale matters when you’re in lockdown—so while LtCol Tharp works on his reply, I’ll answer some of your questions.
Some of you asked about Europe’s response to the pandemic, and which elected officials in Europe should resign according to the criteria I proposed in my last newsletter.
But today, I let’s ask an even more pertinent question:
Should Claire resign?
Argument:
Journalists, political forecasters, and newsletter writers should be held to a “reasonable pundit” standard analogous to the “reasonable elected official” standard. If they fail to forecast the future with the same degree of care, knowledge, experience, fair-mindedness, and awareness as a hypothetical “reasonable pundit,” readers should relieve them of their responsibilities at the first available occasion.
Resolved:
This newsletter holds that Claire not only failed to meet this standard, but blew it spectacularly.
I have many thoughts about why I failed to see this coming. I suspect my cognitive biases were widely shared among Western officials and by Western publics at large, so understanding them may be useful if we’re trying to understand what has happened to us.
But the bottom line? I failed. If you decide to stop reading here and cancel your subscription, I can’t blame you.
Otherwise …
The Paywall of Honor Returns
The rest of this newsletter is behind the Paywall of Honor. If you’ve contributed to my writing, at any point, in any way, in cash or in kind, it’s all for you.
If not, please delete it now.
But no, you can’t read it just because you want the pleasure of hearing me discuss every way I screwed up before cancelling your subscription. That suggests you find this newsletter entertaining, which means the criteria I proposed above are not, in fact, the right ones, so I’m not obliged to resign.
If you’d like to be a man or woman of honor, here are all the ways you can make your bones:
Catastrophic risks
To save you the trouble, I reviewed everything I’ve written since I was eight years old.
I have never written an article, over the course of my career, about the risk of a pandemic, even though, among the foreseeable catastrophic risks confronting humanity, this should have been—and was—on any reasonable person’s top-ten list.
This is all the more astonishing because I’ve written so much about other catastrophic risks—not because I’m an anxious and pessimistic person, although I am, but because catastrophic risks are fascinating problems. As a corollary to Dr. Johnson’s axiom that when a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life, I say that when a man is tired of thinking about the ways life in London might suddenly end, he’s tired of thinking.
In fact, you probably didn’t know this about me, but there’s another Claire—my alter ego, if you will. I feel wistful, sometimes, about the life I might have had if I’d allowed my talents to blossom. We’re all thinking these days about our priorities in life and what’s really meaningful to us. Chris Cuomo has realized his job is pointless and he can’t stand it. I too confess that I’ve been fantasizing about giving up the rat race. “To hell with the everyday drudgery of being a writer in Paris,” I’ve thought. “What’s stopping you, really, from living the dream?”
But I’ll never have the guts to do it. I could never give up the financial security of a freelance writing career.
Nonetheless, I’ve always found the following questions fascinating:
How much should we worry about events that would be catastrophic if they occurred, but are not likely ever to occur?
How should we think about catastrophic events that are highly unlikely to occur on any given day, but highly likely to occur in any given decade—or century, or millenium?
How do we assess these probabilities?
Can we assess them based on the frequency of such catastrophes in the past? (Both in principle and in practice, this is unclear. In principle, we know from Hume that the proposition, “The course of nature continues always uniformly the same” is not based on any argument. In practice, events may be so rare that we have no empirical evidence for them. Consider, for example, Oppenheimer’s concern that the fission bomb might set fire to the entire planet’s atmosphere.)
What is the best way to mitigate catastrophic risk, both generally, and for any given risk?
How much money should we spend to mitigate low-probability catastrophic risks? What about high-probability ones?
At what point does risk mitigation become more costly than the risk it’s meant to mitigate? How should we measure this?
Given limited resources, which are the most important risks to mitigate?
On all of these subjects, by the way, I recommend the writings of friend and loyal CBIIT reade Jim Manzi, who founded and sold an artificial intelligence software company called Applied Predictive Technologies. He’s helped me to think more clearly not only about mitigating the risks of climate change, but about all of these questions.
Catastrophic risk mitigation is a problem of special interest to those of us worried, for good reason, that liberal democracy is collapsing. Are democracies capable of catastrophic risk mitigation, given that by design, their legitimacy devolves from consent of the governed, and the governed are highly unlikely to consent to it? Consider:
Large majorities of the governed are unable to understand or think rationally about catastrophic risk. (Or any risk, for that matter.)
Risk mitigation is often costly. The need for it is rarely obvious to a majority of taxpayers before the catastrophe occurs.
Even when it occurs, they generally respond by demanding the government plan better for a catastrophe that has already occurred, rather than urging upon them the mitigation of all catastrophic risk. (Thus the cliché about generals always preparing to fight the last war, and the plethora of articles we’re now seeing telling us that we spent too much to prevent a terrorist attack and not enough to prevent a pandemic.* When the next catastrophe occurs, we’ll see articles lamenting that we spent too much on preventing pandemics and not enough on moving people out of the Cascadia subduction zone.)
(*These articles are stupid, by the way. If we were prepared for a terrorist attack, we’d be prepared for a bioweapons attack—no different in effect from a natural outbreak. The problem, as I note below, is that we didn’t spend enough to prevent a terrorist attack.)
Catastrophic risk mitigation requires long-term planning, and generally, sustained taxation. Democracies reward leaders who deliver swift and visible achievements while lowering taxes.
Successful risk mitigation plans rely upon continuity in government, whereas democracies are prone to changing governments rapidly.
If catastrophic risk mitigation is successful, taxpayers conclude the risk was never real to begin with and thus their tax dollars (or other sacrifices) were wasted.
It is extremely difficult—not just for the average taxpayer, but for the most careful among them—to distinguish between genuine catastrophic risks and risks that have been invented or inflated by rent-seeking bureaucrats, grant-seeking scientists, or a click-hungry media.
Given this, I’ve long been fascinated by these questions:
Why is it so hard to persuade people to take catastrophic risks seriously, even when they are not—especially in the aggregate—low-probability?
If democracies aren’t well-suited to catastrophic risk mitigation, how might democracy be improved?
Can this be done before a massive catastrophe discredits the idea of democracy or kills us all?
Or might it be genuinely impossible to reconcile democracy and catastrophic risk mitigation? If so, does the problem of catastrophic risk place a natural limit on the lifespan of any democracy?
Given my interest in the subject, it’s genuinely astonishing that I’ve never written a book or even an article about pandemics. It’s even more astonishing that I barely paid attention when this specific pandemic began making headlines in January. This should have mesmerized me.
Why didn’t it?
On hindsight bias
To place the enormity of my failure in context, we must again review timelines and statistics. This Coronavirus Government Response Tracker; in particular, its Stringency Index, is key. Using a consistent set of definitions, it compares policy responses around the world.
It shows that the speed of a country’s response, and the stringency of its countermeasures, have been strongly (inversely) correlated with its death toll. East Asian democracies—and Germany—reacted quickly and stringently to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Thus it was not prima facie impossible for this to happen in a democracy.
If you argue, as my reader Tom McGuire does, that my condemnation of Western elected officials and myself is a classic example of hindsight bias, East Asia and Germany serve as the rebuttal. There are many reasons these countries reacted with superior alacrity. They’re well worth exploring. But for the moment, let’s stick with my failure.
Any journalist with a keen interest in catastrophes should have seen this pandemic coming a million miles away. And my God, if this doesn’t count as a catastrophe, what would? The virus has already killed more people than the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. The global economy has collapsed. I could go on, but it’s probably already dawned on you already that this is bad. Actually, it’s even worse than you realize.
What I got right
I did see that the outbreak was about to explode in the United States before most Americans did. I did offer a timely warning of the need for a strict quarantine and better planning back when that warning should have been taken—and before those measures were implemented, alas.
But I should have seen it coming, as I argued in the previous newsletter, by January 20, at the latest. That I didn’t is inexcusable.
What was I thinking? That’s not a rhetorical question. Literally, what did I think was more important than the news emerging from Wuhan? Embarrassingly, I have a complete written record.
For those of you who subscribed for the pleasure of hearing me admit how badly I screwed up, the good part is coming up. (And if you’re cheating—man, you have no honor at all. Come on.)
A timeline of catastrophic failure
On January 9, the WHO announced that the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan was linked to a novel coronavirus in the SARS family.
On January 14, the WHO issued this infamous tweet:
That tweet, Trump’s defenders would have you believe, kept him government from appreciating the nature of the threat and reacting accordingly.
But note: On January 20, China confirmed the human-to-human transmission of the disease on state television.
Were those six days were so critical as to explain why the United States now has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world?
No. That is absolute nonsense. If I were to tell you, “That’s why I didn’t see it coming,” you’d rightly laugh in my face.
Consider the following:
On December 30, Li Wenliang sent a message to fellow doctors warning them of the outbreak of an illness like SARS. I sent out no newsletter at all.
On December 31, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization’s office in Beijing of the outbreak. I sent out no newsletter at all.
On December 31, the CDC learned—independently—of a cluster of cases in China. I sent out no newsletter at all.
On January 1, the CDC began writing reports about it for HHS. I sent out no newsletter at all.
On January 3, the director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, received a call from his counterpart in China informing him that a respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan. Redfield immediately told Alex Azar, who notified the White House and the National Security Council.
On the same day, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigated the case and interrogated Li, giving him a warning notice and censuring him for “making false comments on the Internet.” I sent out no newsletter at all.
On January 5, the WHO issued this advisory:
There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology. The reported link to a wholesale fish and live animal market could indicate an exposure link to animals. The symptoms reported among the patients are common to several respiratory diseases, and pneumonia is common in the winter season; however, the occurrence of 44 cases of pneumonia requiring hospitalization clustered in space and time should be handled prudently.
Based on information provided by national authorities, WHO’s recommendations on public health measures and surveillance of influenza and severe acute respiratory infections still apply.
WHO does not recommend any specific measures for travellers. In case of symptoms suggestive of respiratory illness either during or after travel, travellers are encouraged to seek medical attention and share travel history with their healthcare provider.
WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the current information available on this event.
On January 5, I did send out a newsletter. I did not mention the novel coronavirus at all. What was I thinking? I was thinking about the killing Qasem Soleimani and the epistemic limits of forecasting. Pundits who claimed the ability to foresee the ramifications of his death, I argued, were severely overconfident in their ability to predict the future. The consequences were literally impossible to forecast because too many key variables were not merely unknown, but unknowable. (I was right about that.)
There’s a sentence in the newsletter that’s tangentially relevant, though:
[Iran] may, despite the perfervid oratory, simply continue their decades-old strategy to patiently evict us from a region that they believe, correctly, we no longer wish to inhabit. … Or they may go really big. Could they imagine this is the time for a regime-change war of their own? Or a massive chemical or biological attack on our soil, perhaps?
So it did occur to your armchair Commander-in-Chief, as early as January 5, that we should be prepared for a biological attack. I was paying no mind to events in Wuhan, but it still crossed my mind.
Had you told me, though, on January 5, that we had no plan to cope with a biological weapons attack, or that our plans would fail in every imaginable way, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d have said, “Don’t be silly. We’ve been preparing for that since September 12.”
If I had been right—if we’d been prepared for a state-sponsored biological attack—we would have been prepared for a bat-sponsored biological attack. One prepares for these things the same way. And, indeed, we were prepared, until Donald Trump took office. No, I’m not pointing this out because I’m blinded by my hatred of Donald Trump. The arrow of causation goes the other way. I’m in a blind rage, to be sure, but it’s because Donald Trump left us defenseless against a pandemic.
If you consult the many plans we’ve made over the years, you can see this. In 2017, USNORTHCOM wrote its Branch Plan 3560 for Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease. Some parts of it are so painfully prescient that I’ve highlighted them, below.
They predicted exactly what would happen, how it would happen, and why it would be a damned catastrophe if it did. They had plans for making sure it didn’t happen, too.
There are presumably many more plans like that sitting in the Pentagon, including the ominous “classified annexes” to which they refer. The military’s not to blame. My assumption on January 5—to wit, “We have plans for that”—was almost correct.
But it wasn’t correct enough. It was wrong because it didn’t occur to me that one of the Trump Administration’s first priorities in office was to eliminate every one of the agencies upon which that plan relied or severely slash its budget.
I should have remembered this article, written in 2017:
To help offset a 10 percent increase in military spending, much of the government would take serious hits, including agencies tasked with biosecurity.
The Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, which tracks outbreaks of disease, would be cut by $136 million, or 9.7 percent. The National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases—a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that fights threats like anthrax and Ebola—would be cut by $65 million, or 11 percent.
The C.D.C.’s Center for Global Health would lose $76 million, or 18 percent. Its Emergency Operations Center, which conducts real-time monitoring of outbreak responses, and its Select Agents Program, which sets regulations in lethal toxin labs and helps researchers stay ahead of bioterrorists, face unspecified cuts as well.
Experts in biological threats are reacting with alarm.
“It’s horrific—worse than I expected,” says J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re just gutting things, overlaying salt upon key institutions, with devastating human impact.”
“When you add those cuts up,” he added, they “will inevitably impact health security.”
Republicans in Congress are no less critical.
“Sometime in the president’s term, you will have a pandemic,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, told the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, at a House budget hearing on Wednesday. …
I didn’t even know that the White House dissolved the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense in May, 2018:
The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
Nor did I know that in 2018, the CDC, owing to lack of funding, had reduced its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks by 80 percent:
The CDC plans to narrow its focus to 10 “priority countries,” starting in October 2019, the official said. They are India, Thailand and Vietnam in Asia; Jordan in the Middle East; Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal in Africa; and Guatemala in Central America.
Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.
Why didn’t any of this occur to me? Why did I just assume we were prepared to cope with, and alert to the threat of, a bioweapons attack? I do know far too much about the US government in general—and the Trump Administration in particular—to have left this assumption unexamined.
There was no excuse.
There’s lots more to say as we wait for LtCol Tharp, but I’ll have to put it in the next newsletter. I failed in January. I failed in February. I even failed in March.
But at least I was entertaining. That’s my job. So was the President. But that’s not his job.
Working hard to meet the deadline. In the mean-time recommend looking at your twitter thread from 2 Feb..... very interesting (read all replies). And no, pundits mess it up all the time but no need to fire.... they usually have little more insight or info that the average Joe, but give us something to bitch about (i.e. keep us entertained).
US worst outbreak in the world. Think again, combine the EU countries and the death rate is massively greater there with only a slightly larger population than the US.
China is not reporting the scope and extent of its epidemic. Do you believe their numbers? I don't.
NY and New Jersey account for almost half of the cases and deaths. The geniuses in charge there left the subways, buses and trains open for three weeks and told people to go to work and might I add enjoy the shows and night life to boot! Statistically, there is a direct correlation between the extend of the outbreak by city and the use of mass transit.
Why are we isolating the entire population when we know that the vast majority of deaths are amongst the elderly with serious preexisting conditions! My position as an economist is that everyone under 50 go back to work and school and let the senior citizens self isolate to protect themselves until we have a therapy or a vaccine. Most of the seniors do not work anyway.