What You Should Do About Coronavirus (Apart From Stay At Home If You Have It)

Because people are susceptible to what psychologists call ‘magnification’ (making a massive thing out of a relatively trivial thing), it was inevitable that the coronavirus reaction would be incommensurably more overblown than the intrinsic problems the virus would have otherwise created. Yes, coronavirus is bad, and it may turn out to be really bad (and if it gets that bad we should act accordingly), but currently the mass overreactions have ensured the damage is already going to turn out to be astronomically worse than it needed to be, especially in terms of economic recession and job losses, where this mass panic into behaviour-change is causing untold damage to industries and livelihoods. 

The only chance of preventing a meltdown (if it’s not too late already) is if everyone stops overreacting - which basically means; unless you have no other option, carry on exactly as you would have before this media frenzy broke out. Don’t panic buy, don’t overconsume, don’t refrain from travelling, don’t cancel events, don’t shut up shop in a panic – at least, not yet, not until it's shown to be necessary - you’ll simply create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby fear of doom will create the very doom you feared.

This type of behaviour is as old as the economic hills, of course – it’s what we call “the tragedy of the commons,” derived from a scenario in which several farmers have one cow and a patch of grass (the commons) that serves everyone, but where a second cow for one farmer eventually causes overconsumption for all the cows to the point where there is no grass to consume. You can probably remember this happening with the petrol crisis about 20 years ago. People panic bought for fear of a shortage, which encouraged others to do the same, which had the net result of creating a shortage, where all the pumps ran dry. If everyone had simply carried on as normal it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.

Unfortunately, there is not an easy solution to the tragedy of the commons-type of problem, because people try to maximise their narrow self-interest, even if it culminates in a net worse collective outcome. To see why, imagine a microcosmic version of society - consider ten people sitting round a table playing a game. The table has a bowl in the middle. The game is simple; each player is given £10 to start and told that whatever they all put in the bowl will be doubled and shared evenly, and they are each allowed to put in anything up to £2 at a time. If all ten players put in £2 first off, the £20 pot will be doubled to £40, and each player gets £4 return. 

Naturally this process could keep continuing, but what tends to happen is that some of the ten will realise that if they don't put in they can improve their wealth relative to other group members. Suppose eight people put in £2 and the other two (Jack and Jill) put in nothing. The £16 pot is doubled to £32, and each member gets £3.20 back (including Jack and Jill, who are now in relative terms each £2 better off than the other eight people). While it’s better to allow a couple of freeloaders than see the whole game collapse, what’s more likely to happen is that others will try a similar strategy, making everyone else (and themselves) worse off in the long run.

It's not only Macbeth or whatshisname in Dangerous Liaisons for whom bad choices can negatively decide their own fate in ways they didn’t expect – with global phenomena and mass communication, this can happen to us all if we are not very careful with our words, actions and reactions.