The Dubious 'What Has The EU Ever Done For Us?' Meme

 

For obvious reasons, this meme above has been doing the rounds recently - purporting to offer a Monty Python-esque rhetorical look at how we've benefitted so greatly from being in the EU. It's a remarkable creation, because pretty much none of the proclamations on the list actually do offer a net benefit to our being in the EU, and the few that do point towards being benefits that would require a lot more unpacking before a robust conclusion is reached, making the list almost entirely superfluous.

To show why, I've grouped them into my perceived categories of error, and highlighted them in the following way:

Category 1 Yellow - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy: in these cases: Since Y (outcome) followed event X (the formation of the EU), Y must have been caused by X. It almost certainly would have happened anyway, especially with the technological advances we’ve made.

Category 2 Red  - Irrelevant, this is one for markets to solve in accordance with their own domestic political legislation, not the EU.

Category 3 Blue - Not a benefit at all because it’s a bad policy, or at the very least one that falls under number Category 1, and probably would have been introduced domestically if good.

Category 4 Green - Too vague to be meaningful, and/or no attempt to justify net benefits in a cost-benefit analysis to determine which aspects of the policy are good and which are not.  

(Some have two colours where both apply)

The ones un-highlighted, I've left for comment – they are:

• The right to work in the EU

My comment: Sorry, no, that’s slippery. You can’t create something like the EU, tell us we have a right to work in it, and then claim it as a benefit. People should have the right to work wherever they want

• 3 million jobs

My comment: No, this fails to understand the basics of economics. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Plus if you create the EU and it's a net bad institution, then the jobs are providing less value than if the workers would doing more productive things. The opportunity cost of EU jobs is probably through the roof, like it is with green jobs.

• Single market, with no export charges or red tape

My comment: Indeed, but the whole world should be a single market with no export changes and as little bureaucracy as possible.

Final comment: I think the best things about the EU involve connectivity and collaboration for the mutual benefit of EU citizens – things like mutually established healthcare across Europe, visa-free travel across Europe, co-operation on counter terrorism intelligence, the European arrest warrant, and investment and collaboration in science – where we make ourselves stronger by working together and cooperating for shared progress. 

Alas, most of the so-called benefits listed on the viral document are embarrassingly weak - and the creator needs to think a bit harder.

 

A Covid-19 Armchair Summary

The responses to Covid-19 from various subsections of society have been fairly predictably representative of society as a whole. If the whole UK population was represented by 100 people, then the reaction to Covid-19 would read something like this (feel free to suggest a more accurate breakdown – this is only a rough guess):

-  8 people are so terrified of Covid-19 that they have been conditioned to think that avoiding Covid-19 is the most important thing in the universe.

-  45 people are following most or all of the rules with alacrity, taking one or two reasonable risks here and there.

-  45 people are highly sceptical about the responses to Covid-19 and believe the decimation of our economy and well-being has been a bad error, but they are reluctantly following most of the rules.

-  2 people are so paranoid and sceptical about Covid-19 that they think it’s little more than a global conspiracy to control us like a Dystopian nightmare.   

As is usually the case, not being a man of extremes, if one person’s mind could be represented as a weighted average of those views, I would probably have sympathy with him. One thing we should all agree on is that in a world full of trade-offs, the Covid-19 situation is a highly complex nexus of considerations, with no easy answers.

One thing seems fairly non-contentious, though: if the NHS had significantly more capacity (that is, if the people likely to need the NHS if they caught Covid-19 chose to risk catching Covid-19 by living a more purposeful, active life), then within reason, with the use of PPE, and in conjunction with some obviously sensible restrictions prohibiting major crowds, the majority of people could have lived and worked according to their own risk calculi, and most of the catastrophic damage to jobs, businesses, the economy, human well-being and relationships could have been avoided. That's a very complex and wordy argument to lay out in full, but I feel fairly sure it's largely true. The NHS workers have done a fantastic job with the odds stacked against them, but through no fault of their own they don’t have the funds, capacity or resources to cope with the kind of scenario I laid out above.

Given the foregoing, I’m also quite sceptical about the wisdom of lockdowns – not just because of the obvious damage they will do to society (and especially in the longer term), but also because it’s possible that the pre-lockdown activity spreads the virus more prominently as people take more risks and socialise more and take greater risks knowing they are soon going to be in lockdown. Then again, there have been some ridiculous contraventions of the law (and general wisdom) with large scale gatherings, without which the situation probably would have been much less severe. These fools make lockdowns much more likely to be imposed on the rest of us.

Perhaps to be the kind of society that definitely doesn’t need a lockdown, we would need a human system that’s capable of assenting to a complex top-down Covid-19 directive that significantly helps stop the spread, but one that’s also capable of facilitating complex bottom-up local incentives connected to social and familial needs, relationships, jobs, businesses and human well-being - and it’s clear we don’t have anything very close to that optimal balance (again, because it’s a very hard balance to strike).

It’s also impossible for any individual mind to ingest the full range of costs of Covid-19, and of associative government policies, because it’s just too much information to comprehend. The lost income, the thwarted behaviour, the cessation of activities that can’t be done online, the social declension, and the effects on well-being and mental health are too multifarious to be absorbed by a single brain - so it’s likely that in making policies to protect us from Covid, politicians and health experts are overestimating the benefits of these policies and underestimating the costs. 

Again, through no real fault of our own, what we also certainly don't have is the sophisticated central intelligence to deal with the fact that Covid-19 poses different threats to different people, and the fact that its existence means very different things across society, as people juggle all kinds of priorities and decision-making. And it should be acknowledged too that not all the economic damage is caused by government-mandated lockdowns - there are many workers and consumers who have chosen to stay at home more and not risk much exposure to infection.

I'm sorry to disappoint any readers who may expect more, but I don't have any grand-slam wisdom about Covid-19 that can act as a panacea against the perceived wisdom of the so-called experts. Something as epistemologically intractable as Covid-19 just makes me inclined towards Ecclesiastes 9:17, which says that "The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools."

I do, however, think it is remarkable and alarming how so many people have pushed the narrative that all that really matters these days is avoiding Covid-19, and that no other goals are worth considering if they don't wholly espouse the absolutist position of Covid-avoidance. It's also outrageous to me that our political elite has made virtually all of its decisions without even a flicker of a justification for why these decisions are better than the alternatives. They have acted all the way through as though the alternative consideration doesn't even need an acknowledgement, let alone an argument as to why an alternative model is a preferred one.

Covid-19 is serious, but for most people, the avoidance of it is not the most important thing above all else - we just don't have the central intelligence to facilitate those complex human needs and preferences. And nor will it turn out to have been worth pursuing Covid-19 avoidance at all other costs. I have little doubt that that will turn out to be right, although I have somewhat more doubt than anyone or any group really has enough wisdom and foresight to have got us through the crisis very much better. So I think we should adopt a humble, forgiving spirit of pulling together, and encourage each other with kindness and grace wherever possible.