Leviathan in Lockdown
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I’d argue that some governments have a very tenuous grip on the above two levers. COVID-19 has merely brought that into stark relief. I think that those taking a gamble that the majority will be content to suffer (primarily) their old folk suffering and dying in order to keep the grindstone of the economy turning, will find out they are mistaken.
My reason for that belief is the behavior people show: they do not spend their money to pay for better health/elderly care to give their (grand) parents another year or two. And the old rather pass on money instead of spending it in an attempt to get another five years. A much weaker economy is functionally very similar to spending your savings in a good economy: you're going to be out of money in a few years.
Question: Where should one start in reading David Hume?
* 'That Politics may be reduced to a Science' ("It is a question with several, whether there be any essential difference between one form of government and another? and, whether every form may not become good or bad, according as it is well or ill administered?")
* 'Of the First Principles of Government' ("Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few")
* 'Of the Origin of Government' ("Man, born in a family, is compelled to maintain society, from necessity, from natural inclination, and from habit.")
* 'Of Parties in General' ("As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws.")
* 'Of Passive Obedience' ("The maxim, fiat Justitia & ruat Coelum, let justice be performed, though the universe be destroyed, is apparently false, and by sacrificing the end to the means, shews a preposterous idea of the subordination of duties.")
* 'Of the Coalition of Parties' ("Liberty is a blessing so inestimable, that, wherever there appears any probability of recovering it, a nation may willingly run many hazards, and ought not even to repine at the greatest effusion of blood or dissipation of treasure. All human institutions, and none more than government, are in continual fluctuation.")
* 'Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' ("What depends upon a few persons is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes: What arises from a great number, may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.")
* 'Of Commerce' ("The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers, who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers, who go beyond it.")
* 'Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing' ("Fine writing, according to Mr. Addison, consists of sentiments, which are natural, without being obvious. There cannot be a juster, and more concise definition of fine writing.")
* 'Of Refinement in the Arts' ("We shall here endeavour to correct both these extremes, by proving, first, that the ages of refinement are both the happiest and most virtuous; secondly, that wherever luxury ceases to be innocent, it also ceases to be beneficial; and when carried a degree too far, is a quality pernicious, though perhaps not the most pernicious, to political society.")
[0]: Available on https://davidhume.org/
1. The graphic is a woodcut. Details take a LOT of time to produce, and they make the woodcut less durable.
2. Remember that Hobbes's Leviathan idea was revolutionary back then. The idea that each of us answers to an abstract entity of truth and justice overturned the idea that the monarchy could, and had to, dream up every single rule of conduct (or point to the Hebrew Bible when it was convenient).
Here's a 21st century non-Leviathan way of thinking. On the wall of a flight school I once saw a printed sign saying "Do not buzz your house." Scrawled under that was "or anybody else's house either."
In our Leviathan world we know it's unwise for student pilots, or anyone, to fly low over populated areas. We hardly have to run through the reasons: hurtling tanks of gas, telephone poles, small children ... Pre-Leviathan, everybody had to rely on handed-down laws. And when they were insufficient they had to be amended.
(Gasoline fumes are well known to transport young men back to a pre-Leviathan mode of civilization. :-)
Imagine the Internet in a pre-leviathan time. If all we knew was the content of RFC5861, and didn't know why TCP congestion control (slow-start / exponential backoff) was useful, routers would drop many more packets than they do today.
Plus, I prefer my Big Brothers with long curly hair.
(sorry for the german wikilink, but it has more pictures than the english equivalent)
Alternatively, they could be two people with long, pointy hoods stylized to point backwards.
I took this photo of them from a 17C copy of Leviathan at the British Library: https://ibb.co/DGL4dJj
Edit: Not sure why the parent comment is being downvoted? They're making a completely legitimate observation.
Look like hoods to me. But, whatever works for the essay... The REAL mystery is what the two baseball batters are doing on the left side of the image.
Do you have any examples of artwork from the 14th century showing people wearing long pointy hoods stylized to point backwards?
It's why I predicted re-opening before mid-june, as if we lose a spring season, we fall into dependency and long term losses.
> "three years of famine"
Less than 3% of the population is involved in food production in modern times.
I’m not saying this virus is enough to cause famine in the USA. I just think it’s silly to assume that because (somewhere in our country) there is the capability to grow enough food for everybody that therefore there can’t be famine anymore.
(Even before the virus hit we have been massively overproducing and wasting food globally. People go hungry today not because of lack of production but because it's cheaper to throw away food than give it to those in need. Shamefull, IMO, but that's the way it is. We could feed everybody on Earth but we just don't.)
Advice meant for the ruler of a small kingdom or city-state twenty centuries ago just isn't applicable today.
Globally, yes, there will be famine. I don't have enough information to do other than speculate but even though it seems likely at this point I would be surprised if it happens due to lack of food rather than failures of distribution.
I believe that, if we can just get our act together a little bit, we can weather the virus and repair the economy and no one has to starve. We have the capacity to grow and deliver the food.
- - - -
I have to add, I was watching John Oliver's show the other day and he had a clip of that Alex Jones guy advocating cannibalism, talking openly about how he's down to eat his neighbors! I'm looking at him thinking, "You got a lotta meat on yer bones to talk like that fella."
When this all first started I was worried about the failure of the food system and the possibility of "long pork" appearing in city butcher shops. Once I got more information I felt silly: at it's worst this virus can't kill enough people fast enough to disrupt the system badly enough. The worst-case scenario still isn't that bad. It's still horrible, but at least we won't have to eat each other.
The thing is you (in the US) and we (in the generalized Western world) theoretically have enough capacity to grow and deliver food, but caveats abound. Right this very moment, farmers in the US are destroying fields of perfectly good produce, because with HoReCa market disappearing, the supply chain can't readjust fast enough to redirect all this food to grocery stores and food banks. Processing, packaging, shipping and certifications are all a problem, so as a result, whole harvests go to waste, and the farmers that won't be bankrupted by that may be very careful about what, and how much, they plant next season.
(My favourite, early example of that is flour being forever out of stock in some countries, like the UK. Turns out, it's not for the lack of flour, but lack of packaging - as bakeries lost a big chunk of their market and people started baking bread at home, there isn't enough capacity to package the flour in consumer-sized bags. But if you want to buy flour by 50 kilo bags, you can easily find someone who'll accommodate you.)
Similar stories from the US wrt. meat processing - farmers struggling to find ways to euthanize and dispose of hogs, as meat processing plants around the country suffered a series of COVID-19 outbreaks. There's no way to buffer hogs; they take lots of space and food, and keep growing in size beyond what the pipeline is able to process. Last I checked on /r/supplychain, the processing capacity is reported to have risen again to 71% of the usual.
Then, for more varied fruits & vegs there's the ongoing migrant worker problem that I don't think has been resolved, though it has fallen off the news cycle a while ago. But in April, farmers were worried that they'll have to destroy their whole fields because without cheap migrant labor, they can't sell their harvest.
(With the exception of massive meat processing plant shutdowns, the I hear the same stories all around Europe as well.)
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As for the poorer countries - remember that locust plague we discussed on HN early this year? They're still out there, and on their way to eat India.
(Frankly I haven't heard enough Americans saying, "Let's roll!" on this. We should be nailing it down and positioning ourselves to be ready to help the harder-hit nations in the next few months. That's the American way!)
All the noise about "sacrifice the weak to save the economy" (coming from about ~15% or 3/20 folks only) is IMO a distraction from focusing on the vital systems and figuring out and doing what has to be done to keep things stable.
As long as people don't starve we can sort the paperwork.
If you have a bunch of hungry people and a bunch of food in fields there has to be some synergy there, eh? (Not trying to be flip, just upbeat.)
The consensus among economists is that not having a lockdown would be worse for the economy than having one: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/policy-for-the-covid-19-cr...
The opportunity to avoid economic damage passed as soon as COVID-19 became pandemic. Ending lockdowns early will make economic harm worse.
This exact same debate played out with the 1918 Flu, and regions that took more stringent measures for longer came out better economically: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560
That's a misrepresentation. Both sides understand that economic harm is guaranteed. The question is when the economic harm of quarantine-caused business collapses and job losses exceeds the economic harm of casualties. Personally, like most of HN, I'm fine with extending the quarantine but, being HNers, we can afford to weather the storm; the majority are not so fortunate. And even I don't think that the US can afford to have the quarantine last much longer than another month or two.
I don't think the 1918 pandemic is necessarily good guidance for that since households were more self-sufficient then.
Polls show the vast majority of the population supports extending shelter-in-place, and (in polls where it gets broken out) that that support is stronger among the lower economic strata. Opposition, though weak everywhere, is stronger among people who worry about how their investment portfolio is doing. Some examples:
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/press-release/poll-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/despite...
https://www.chcf.org/blog/covid-19-tracking-poll-75-californ...
However, I also don't think the economic impact has truly started to bite into enough of the population hard enough yet. It will be interesting to see where those polls sit in a couple of months.
Which totally makes sense to me. Those with lower economic status have less power, so if they want to shelter-in-place they have greater need for a government order to provide cover for their decision.
There is a legitimate concern that the longer a hard lockdown/quarantine goes, the more ethically thorny it gets because authorities inadvertently accumulate the responsibility to prioritize the selective distribution of relief under the lockdown. That's when you get the revolts you're seeing in states today by people who are taking family losses and seeing them given to those they perceive as politically privileged groups. True or not, that perception is what drives people into the streets to protest.
> The question is when the economic harm of quarantine-caused business collapses and job losses exceeds the economic harm of casualties.
The question is how to mitigate the harms.
The "casualties" are not the extent of the economic harm. Suppose a relaxing of the "quarantine" is followed by another large wave of cases, leading to panic, social unrest, and an emergency imposition of a more serious quarantine?
As for me, I'm one of the at-risk populations; me and my wallet are mostly staying home for the foreseeable future. If that causes any economic harm, I'm sorry. But I would appreciate being able to get groceries (and book shipments) in the duration.
It seems silly to me that people don't think that balance exists. The question isn't weather it exists, it's how do you calculate it. The human side is considered "easy" since they do keep an estimate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
The hard part in this case is projecting anything meaningful in terms of both number of people dead under different scenarios, and the economic losses. Both are super hard to estimate, but to think that kind of balance is somehow "immoral" is kinda short sighted. It's a form of the trolley problem.
D-Day was known in advance to be a huge loss of life. People in places of power sometimes have enormous responsibility in no-win situations. We can hope that they have the right motives.
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