The Good Cop, Bad Cop Post-Covid Analysis

 

In 1963, a psychologist called Bob Rosenthal conducted an experiment in which his assistants placed rats in mazes, and then timed how long it takes the rats to find the exit. They were housed in two pens: one for the smartest rats and one for the ordinary rats - and when released, the assistants thought that the smartest rats found the exit more quickly than the ordinary rats. In reality, there was no difference between the two groups of rats – it was the assistants’ expectations that tricked them into believing smart rats solve mazes more quickly.

This plays out in many walks of life – we are surrounded by self-fulfilling prophecies in the making. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are smarter than they are probably will observe them doing better than expected. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are hopeless will likely see the opposite effect. If you treat your husband or wife as though they are the most valuable person in your life, you will see more of the value in them than if you treat them as though they are not your priority.

This is known in psychology as The Pygmalion Effect, after Ovid’s Greek myth, where a sculptor called Pygmalion regards his own statue as beautiful, falls in love with it, and it comes alive. When we have high standards and high expectations of others, we get better results; when we have low standards and low expectations, we get poorer results. People are inspired or uninspired by how we value them.

Similarly, placebos (positive) and nocebos (negative) become self-fulfilling prophecies too. If you believe you’ve taken a pill that has a positive effect on your well-being, you might act as though it has. If you believe a pill has negative side effects, you may feel those side effects based more on your belief than on any real side effects. If you believe your bank is going to collapse, you might bring about a bank run, which then causes the bank to collapse. If the Prime Minister forewarns a recession, he might engender a recession, as people could become nervous about spending money, and be reluctant to invest in others.

Applying all that to Covid - over the past 4 years, just about everyone has wondered whether the government's policies to tackle Covid have been worth the cost. Those who say that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people so we didn’t need all those government restrictions may be missing the point that it might be because of government restrictions that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people. It could be fallacious to use the successes of the restrictions as an argument against the restrictions, just as it might be foolish to argue that the lack of nuclear warfare in the past 50 years is a good argument as to why we don’t need nuclear weapons (it may be that it’s because of nuclear weapons, and the deterrent effect, that there hasn’t been nuclear warfare in the past 50 years). 

But that said, there has been a book recently published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, containing research by Johns Hopkins and Lund University that casts quite a few aspersions on the efficacy of the lockdowns during Covid. The lockdowns appear to have reduced Covid deaths by a lot less than one might have hoped, given their astronomical costs.

Now, I’m not going to state the obvious cases for and against the government’s Covid policies. Anyone can work these out for themselves, and decide how they feel about the decisions based on their own personal preferences. But many people rightly insist that individuals are better equipped than the government to know their own individual risk calculi, and how much they value things like going to work, seeing family, socialising with friends, going to school, attending weddings and funerals, etc. For this reason, they argue that the government had no business making such life-changing decisions on the nation’s behalf. Many others seem quite glad that the government took control and made such bold decisions, and feel that things could have been a lot worse without the strict policies imposed on us. The best argument for the government’s decision seems to be that the NHS couldn’t have coped if everyone had remained free to undertake their own risk calculi.

On that basis, an argument that could be made in favour of that proposition is that we could be living an even more dismal reality had we not have lived through this strict regime. An argument against the proposition is that the reason we aren’t living an even more dismal reality is because we adjusted our behaviour accordingly to compensate for the increased risks, and could have done so without the government’s decision to impose such a massive financial and social cost to the nation. There’s no question that, for Britain, the NHS factor makes the matter much harder to resolve.

Aside from the stability of the NHS argument (which isn’t trivial), I really can’t think of a good argument that trumps the argument for the liberty of individual choices on how they behave during a pandemic. One counterpoint is that we didn’t know just how bad the virus was and how great the risks, so we needed the government to make that decision for us. But it’s not a very convincing argument. If your car has a squeaking sound on the morning you are about to drive across the country to see your family, you don’t know for sure whether you should risk the trip, stay at home, or pay extra and go on the train. It might not be an easy decision, but it certainly won’t be the case that outsourcing the problem to the government will make them better equipped to decide for you. No politician knows enough of the factors to act on your behalf on this matter.

This logic also applies in response to the other common objection - that without the government to impose restrictions, then by socialising you may well infect people who didn't want to be infected. But in the vast majority of cases, that argument doesn't hold. It's true that if I went to church, or to Frank's 60th birthday party, or to the snooker club, I might have infected others. But the people at those events also knew the risks of attending, but did so anyway, presumably because they took the benefit of attendance as being worth the risk in terms of their own personal utility. Besides, if your argument is that socialising during the pandemic is reckless because those who socialise do not bear all the costs of their decisions to socialise, then it may have slipped your notice that the politicians imposing all the restrictions on us, and decimating the UK economy in the process, bear virtually zero costs for their actions. When those politicians were caught breaking the rules they imposed on the rest of us, their actions suggested that they weren't especially bothered about the risks of catching Covid, and that they had little respect for the efficacy of the laws they imposed on everyone else.