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.

Dense Populations

I’ve seen several articles recently in the mainstream media, including one from the BBC and one from Sky News, questioning which countries have had the best and worst Covid-19 policies thus far, where this information is being distilled by considering things like number of deaths, population density and herd immunity. But both articles neglect to consider this properly, because they talk about population density as if it's the same thing everywhere you go. It isn't.

Interaction rates differ from place to place once you stop thinking of population density as merely population divided by area, and herd immunity differs from place to once you consider the different dynamics of interaction and exposure. Herd immunity must, by its very nature, bring about different percentages of immunity in different areas of the land.

Frequency of interaction depends somewhat on population density, but not comprehensively. It's an error to merely calculate density by dividing the population by area. Adding 50,000 square miles of uninhabited fields is not going to have a radical effect on the Covid mixing effect in terms of population divided by area, despite causing a reduction in overall population density. And at the same time it has no tangible effect on the average density from the perspective of any one individual.

 

Further Reading: The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

 

 

 

 

Humans Are Fairly Competent Risk Assessors: And This Was One Of The Worst Policy Decisions I’ve Ever Seen

I see last week that Boris has deigned to allow socially distant wedding receptions to go ahead again after spending the previous 2 weeks spoiling people’s Big Day, and throwing the wedding, restaurant, flower and beauty industries into needless uncertainty. I have to say that, in terms of short-sighted stupidity, the initial decision to prevent wedding receptions with no notice was one of the worst small domestic policy decisions I’ve ever seen a government make. It was disgraceful that the government senselessly spoiled everyone's wedding plans for 14 days with Boris's ridiculous metaphor about squeezing the brake pedal.

Of course it's possibly sensible to show some caution to avoid another spike, and it's probably reasonable to squeeze that brake pedal when it comes to casinos, bowling alleys and skating rinks. But weddings are different for a number of reasons, and without writing a long missive expounding on what most of you surely also concluded, let's just say that this decision was a needless, callous, unsympathetic assault on thousands of people's special occasions - not to mention the detrimental effects on small businesses, on people's mental well-being, and on the ushering in of pointless uncertainty for future wedding dates. Weddings of up to 30 people, where properly conducted social distance measures are adhere to, are relatively low risk occasions - whereas the government-mandated short notice decimation of thousands of people's precious celebrations was guaranteed to cause much more unreasonable pain and disappointment than any politicians should have the power to cause.

I'm afraid that decision, like so many others is indicative of two principal things: that politicians have too much control over our lives, and that they are poor judges of the individual risk calculus under which humans operate. They are allowed to get away with it because for years the meagre bandwidth of political discourse on which this country has been fed has made us believe we are incapable of taking responsibility for our own lives.

Reality check

The world is risky, and society is complex as people try to negotiate numerous trade-offs every day of their lives. Should I park on a single yellow line for 10 minutes while I pop into the bank? Shall I go cycling tonight or write an essay? Should I order the Belgian chocolate cheesecake or go without for the sake of my waistline? Should I break the speed limit if I’m late for a friend's barbecue? People make these trade-offs every day; they trade-off the slight risk of a heart attack for a slice of cheesecake, and the slightly increased risk of a speeding fine to get to their friend’s barbecue. Moreover, as cars become better, people take more risks. The introduction of seatbelts meant drivers were prepared to drive less safely with seatbelts on for a faster ride*. The introduction of a more diverse range of tasty food meant people were prepared to increase their chances of atherosclerosis to enjoy a richer cuisine. The list is near-endless.

Many of those calculations take place within the subconscious, and don’t become a very active part of our active conscious negotiations. We are ultra-fast risk assessors, and generally pretty good at doing a better job than anyone else at optimising our own utility. Covid-19 has, of course, altered the landscape of our ordinary day to day risk calculus, where we now have to factor in questions like whether we should wear a mask, go on holiday, visit our relatives, and shop in the supermarket. And politicians now have to make more difficult policy decisions regarding whether to impose a lockdown, whether schools can open, and how to prioritise PPE provisions.

 

The problem politicians have (and ditto biologists, epidemiologist, and chemists) is that society is too complex and too locally bottom-up oriented for any authority figures to know the ratio of Covid to freedom and value that we’d prefer, or the optimal trade-off between more safety and fewer economic transactions. Imagine a lockdown policy that’s expected to save 20,000 British lives (let's say random lives for simplicity). How do we determine if that policy is worth adopting? As a percentage of the UK population, 20,000 lives is about 0.03% of the population. That means that, all things being equal, the policy has a 0.03% probability of saving your life (that's a 1 in 3350 chance of you dying). What are you personally willing to pay for a policy that has a 0.03% of saving your life? Let's say everyone in the UK would be willing to pay £1500 to avoid a 1 in 3350 chance of death, then a policy that cost each citizen £1500 would cost the UK over £100 billion. Consequently, such a policy would only be beneficial for the UK if it reduced the national income by less than £100 billion.

The trouble is, it's nigh-on impossible to know how much we'd pay to avoid a 1 in n chance of death, especially as everyone in the UK does not have an equal chance of dying. And this equation is made more difficult still, of course, by the fact that every individual has their own personal calculi regarding how they negotiate life's trade-offs. Some people are more risk-averse than others. Some are in a higher fatality risk category than others. Some people need more social interaction than others. Some are eager to get married in the next month, whereas others are more willing to wait until next year. Only we as individuals have the composite knowledge to evaluate our personal package of costs and benefits, and negotiate our own risk calculus to make decisions consistent with what we value.

A politician might protest that we are alright looking after ourselves, but others need protecting to ensure we don’t impose unwanted costs on them. But while that’s occasionally true, it’s mostly false. If everyone is allowed to make their own policy decisions, then the revealed preferences should start to play out in a fashion that best serves society as a whole. Some businesses will operate with more risk tolerance, some with more risk aversion; some prices will rise, some will fall; some people will change their behaviour a lot, some only a little; some will opt for a slightly smaller chance of Covid-19 for more social distance, and some will opt for a slightly greater chance of Covid-19 to save their business, or to stay in close contact with friends, or to pursue the burgeoning romance they had just begun. There isn’t much a government can do to make things more optimal than society’s collective can manage themselves.

Therefore, it's not self-evident that we shouldn't have just accepted that Covid-19 was going to be a problem we have to live alongside for a while, and that only elderly people and younger vulnerable people needed to shield, while the rest of the country carried on in a thriving economy as usual, and simply self-isolated if they showed Covid-19 symptoms (which is what most were doing anyway, whether they had symptoms or not). I'm not sure that's right, but I'm not sure it's wrong either. It’s almost impossible to measure how well everyone has done so far during this Covid-19 crisis, because we don’t know how much the Covid-19 policies have cost, how many present lives have been saved, how many future lives have been lost, how much future damage has been done, and what the near infinite alternative permutations might have yielded.

But just to get a sense of things - economists have fairly consensually measured on the basis of how we’ll behave probabilistically to avoid death that a human life is valued at approximately $10 million dollars. In other words, empirically people are willing to pay about $1 to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance of death. If we suppose the Covid policies have cost us at least half of this year's economic activity, that's the pound sterling equivalent of about $1.4 trillion, which at $10 million per life is about 140,000 lives. Only if the Covid-19 policies have saved at least that many UK lives, and there was no better alternative, can we say that they have been the right policies. And remember, when recording Covid-19 deaths, we must only record here those who wouldn't have died anyway during the same period, which makes the total number of Covid-19 deaths significantly lower than the 41,000 the ONS stats tell us

And that is the upshot of the past few months of Covid-19. Some people wanted the economy shut down and for everyone to keep an ultra-safe distance until Covid-19 diminished; some people wanted to protect the economy and live on through it until Covid-19 diminished and come out the other side stronger; some who initially demanded months of lockdown are now telling us how worried they are about the economy - and no one is probably ever going to know with certainty what the absolute optimum approach was.

 

* If you doubt this, you only need consider the statement when said this way - "If a driver has no seat belt he or she will drive more carefully" - a statement that is very obviously true, and one that no one has any issue with.  Saying "People drive less safely with seatbelts on" is just another way of saying "People drive more safely with seatbelts off". Both are equally true, they are just different words to say the same thing.

The Lockdown Luxury Our Forebears Wouldn't Understand

I’ve been relatively quiet on the subject of Coronavirus (just 3 blog posts, see here - which is quiet for me! Heh!). One reason is because I’ve been very busy; another reason is that articles on Coronavirus are fraught by being riddled with incomplete information (which we won’t know until after this is over) and are therefore full of pointless projections and comparisons; and a third reason is that whatever you believe with regard to whether or not domestic governments have handled the crisis well or poorly, I would prefer a spirit of kindness and encouragement on the grounds that I think, by and large, people are trying their best to get things right, and I commend them for that.

The more interesting point I want to make here is that our response to Coronavirus is a demonstration of capitalism at its finest, and a demonstration of socialism as a beneficial adjunct to the market when applied properly. This delineation is what I call the market economy and the socio-personal economy. The principal distinction is that the market economy has exchanges that are precisely recorded in terms of cash exchanged or increases/decreases in 1s and 0s on banks' computers, and the socio-personal economy has exchanges that are less-precisely recorded in terms of helpful gestures and voluntary transactions for the good of one another (there is lots of overlap between the two, of course - a financial economy has a necessary social economy woven into it, because it’s hard to be successful in business without good socio-personal qualities).

The key difference between their operations is roughly this. In the financial economy the demand almost always exceeds the supply (of a limited range of labour, goods and services), because suppliers maintain their status differential (principally income) by increasing their prices or their supplies (or a combination of both), and endeavour to become top of the supplier tree by out-competing their competitors. Whereas in the socio-personal economy, the potential supply (of a nigh-on unbounded range of actions) almost always exceeds the demand, and suppliers who care enough about others maintain their status differential (primarily their character and reputation) by trying to summon up new ways to improve their surroundings and become better people.

The key take home lesson of the temporary lockdown of much of the economy is that our ability to do so is testament to the success of capitalism and how well-off we’ve become relative to any time in history. We can afford to take 6 months off in ways that would have killed our progenitors in the fraction of the time. I’m not saying there won’t be dire economic consequences of the lockdown. But the fact that we can do it at all and pull through together is because our economic prosperity is so prodigious, our capacity to help each other (with time, with donations, with resources) is so plentiful, and our technological advancements (laptops, mobile phones, the Internet, Skype, Zoom, etc) are so impressive. None of our ancestors could have afforded a lockdown like this.

There’s no question that people living 100 years ago wouldn’t have been able to give up work for 6 months and survive; and people of 50 years ago would have done slightly better than them, but still would have only been able to give up a fraction of their work time compared to now. The consensus for a lockdown was equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of capitalism. And the consensus for the benefits of pulling together and voluntarily helping each other is equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of a socio-personal-kind of socialism (the one I’m always advocating) that doesn’t interfere with the fundamental beneficial mechanisms of the free market. 

And if you’re tempted to respond that the government’s financial rescue mission during the Coronavirus is a testament to the powers of a socialistic redistributionist economy, then your error is a bit like a man who sees a passer-by jump into the river to save a drowning boy and thereby concludes that it’s a good thing when we all jump into rivers, mess our clothes up and risk drowning ourselves in the process as we get tangled up in the reeds and stuck in the muddy river bed. 

Here’s why. The principal metric of a successful financial economy is in ascertaining value (which is consumer surpluses + producer surpluses). Created value helps us determine whether resources are being allocated well or poorly, and prices provide the information signals that help us determine whether resources could be allocated even more optimally. The sharing of ideas through competition is what helps us advance, not just in terms of improved allocation of resources, but also in terms of better products at cheaper prices and more readily available to meet increasing demand. The government hand-outs are a necessary act to help in a crisis – but they are an attempt to save trees that have already been planted, not to irrigate once barren ground in the way that capitalism does. It's only because of capitalism that there is any government or socialism at all.

 

Coronavirus Tip: When Appropriate, Become Schrödinger's Shopper

The lockdown during Coronavirus is excessive because the law is too low-resolution to capture the full and complex gamut of human needs. While there's definitely a spectrum ranging from essential trips (key workers doing their jobs, food shopping, getting medication for a vulnerable family member) to non-essential trips (parties, barbecues, sports events), there are definitely trips out that are currently deemed illegal that are both harmless and socially beneficial.

Here are some fictional cases I just made up. Take beloveds Jack and Jill, who both live on their own and work from home, but who visit each other because they love and miss each other. Take Bob, who suffers from depression, and who finds solace in his weekly catch ups around his best friend Frank's house. Take Margaret, who lives alone, but who takes inspiration from going out to paint landscapes, and needs to keep busy and creative for her own well-being. Or take Belinda who has started dating Jack and doesn't want the seed of something special to fail to germinate; or Wendy who comforts her brother and recent widower David with hugs and help with his domestic responsibilities.

While we can easily sympathise with the spirit of the current social restrictions, there are many safe, low-risk ways to go out that impose no significant danger for anyone else but the participants, but that would be prohibited under the current lockdown laws, and constitute an unfair imposition on the people involved.

To those people, my light-hearted tip to get around this problem and avoid having to lie to the police if you're stopped is this: become what we might call Schrödinger's Shopper. That is, when you go out safely to see your beloved, or safely to provide a hug and comfort for your lonely friend, or safely to buy the paints you need to stimulate your life with meaning and avoid the doldrums of mental inertia, adopt a Schrödinger-esque superposition state of being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get stopped by the police.

 

If you're travelling to see another person in safe circumstances, then if you make your trip without getting stopped by the police, no problem. If however you do get stopped, tell the police you're about to go shopping, and then go shopping, make your visit to where you were going, then drive home with your shopping (or shop for the person you are visiting - the world is your oyster), ensuring no lie has been told, and you've covered yourself by being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get pulled over and asked what you're doing out.

 

 

Coronavirus: The Best Strategy May Not Be As Obvious As You Think

I think the safest thing we can say about the coronavirus problem is that it's too complex for anyone to fully understand. If you try to measure on a scale of 0-100 what you think the national response should be (pretending you don't know full well that the government can't do anything like as much as people think), where 0 is 'carry on as you were and do absolutely nothing', and 100 is 'the country in near lockdown', the right response rating is going to be somewhere between 0-100. But not only is it the case that no one knows exactly what the right number response rating is, it's also inevitable that the right number response rating changes each day with each changing situation.

The situation today is roughly as the epidemiologists predicted - the virus has spread considerably and will infect many more people as it heads towards its peak. We also know that the coronavirus is growing exponentially, and that the earlier the countries responded with things like social distancing and self-isolation, the slower the spread of the virus.

For some, it seems obvious – the UK government has made a huge blunder by not reacting earlier to encourage social distancing and putting us in lockdown. But as I said, this problem is highly complex, and just because some countries slowed the spread of the virus by acting early, that doesn't mean every country should do the same.

Here's why. Let me tell you a few things we don't know. We don't know how many people in the UK have the coronavirus, we don't know the dynamics of exactly how it will spread, or exactly how fast, or among whom, nor the patterns of immunity, nor the complex dynamics of knock-on effects. But I can tell you two things I do know with a reasonable degree of confidence.

First, you as an individual know your own cost-benefit ratios for every social situation better than anybody else. If the benefit of a particular event of social interaction isn't significant to you, then stay at home. And like a sorites-type analysis (when does a heap become a heap?) the older you are, the more important this cost-benefit consideration becomes. Don't take unnecessary risks for relatively small gains. There are so many positive things you can do when you're self-isolating - things that really matter; prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading, learning, family relationship-building, writing emails to friends, catching up on jobs your future self won't have time to do when things are busier, you name it.

Second, in case anyone isn't entirely clear on this, the reason people shouldn't panic buy isn't just because we should all be kind, thoughtful citizens who need to be mindful of the negative effects on society's most vulnerable (although that is a good enough reason in itself). No, it's also because, even if your short-term interests are narrow enough to stockpile, and you think it's wise to only look after yourself and your immediate family, you'll very likely go on to hurt your future self and your future immediate family too in the long run, because further down the line everyone's well-being and stability is both proximally and distally connected to everyone else's. 

To see why, imagine if panic buying yields something like a Pareto distribution (otherwise known as the 80/20 rule - roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes), where a high proportion of the necessary goods are stockpiled by a small proportion of the people - it could slowly knock-on to retard the supply and demand distributions across the UK, until it hurts people the stockpilers also rely on. Somewhere down the line, the teachers, nurses, bus drivers, shop assistants and delivery drivers might pay the price of your stockpiling in a way that snaps back to undermine the supply chains to the goods and services on which your future self and your future immediate family will also rely. The economy needs to stay as stable as possible, and the supply and demand links must flow as steadily as possible for the good of everyone. Everyone carrying on only buying what we need is a good way to help this stability.

Nobody, including me, knows exactly the best way to tackle the coronavirus outbreak in exactly the right way with exactly the right courses of action at exactly the right times - and anybody that tells you otherwise is either a liar or deluded. But I'm going to make a suggestion that has a good chance of being somewhere near right. Just like the damage to the supply and demand chains I mentioned with the panic buying, it is also probable that short-term overreactions in terms of obstructing economic activity could decimate the economy in the longer term in ways that could harm society even more than the eventual medical effects of the coronavirus.

In other words, if you’re faced with the prospect of an economic recession (x) and a mass infection (y), you are only realistically going to see one of the following outcomes:

1) No x and no y

2) X but no Y

3) Y but no x

4) Both x and y

If we assume that 1 simply isn't going to happen, that it seems fairly certain that y is going to happen (which also rules out 2), and agree that 4 is cleary the worst scenario and the one we really want to avoid most, then it's clear that number 3 would be our least bad of all the realistic scenarios. Like everyone else, I do not know if we can achieve number 3, and even if we could, I'm not even sure how we could achieve it - but if there's an outside chance that in the medium to long term the probability of an utterly decimated global economy could be traded off against a slightly larger set of infected people in the short term, then it's possible that not going into a complete shutdown is something our future selves will thank us for in the long run.

Given that a lot of people are going to be infected, they can either be infected with a decimated economy, or with only a badly hit economy, and it isn't easy to know how bad the economic damage will be, or the rate of the spread of infection, because the further into the future we try to go with our predictions, the greater the possibility of margin of error. But equally, it isn’t obvious that we could have realistically stopped an exponential spread, given that we don't have an authoritarian political system, and that so many infected people remained under the radar, so there might be some unseen wisdom in the government's current strategy, even if it seems to many quite counterintuitive.

The upshot is, even though the natural instinct might be to try to protect everyone by mass isolation and shutting down large swathes of our industry, it really may not be the best medium to long-term strategy for maximising human utility. The best response might well be a mass bottom up approach whereby people act on new information in accordance with a medium term strategy that maximises the immediate interest as best they can. So for example, we know age determines risk of death, which means older people should act in conjunction with the greater risk their freedom poses. For now, don't go to places you don't need to go to, don't put any unnecessary strain on the NHS, and assume the conditions that minimise your chances of infection with the optimum trade off in a way that maximises value for you and your loved ones in the short term but also for the medium to long term strategies of our future selves. 

To see why this might be the best approach, consider an illustration. The economy is finely balanced with a delicate framework of connectivity- it took hundreds of years to evolve and develop. It is a bit like a well-functioning brain, and a damaged economy is a bit like the process of necrosis, which is where cells are damaged by things like infection, inflammation, injury, blood flow or trauma, leading to overall cognitive impairment. The more the brain is damaged by necrosis, the worse the cognition becomes, and the worse it can become still.

Damage to various sectors of industry could work in a similar (although not exactly identical) way. The more the supply chains are undermined, the more barriers to trade emerge, the more income lost, the more people are out of work, the bigger the economic damage - and once an economy becomes damaged to that extent, it could quite easily set off a kind of social butterfly effect of shortage, hunger and mass deprivation that governments are powerless to repair, and from which humans find it difficult to recover quickly. 

The safest bet is we'd do well not to over-react or under-react, and we'll do even better if we don't get the balance of our short-term and medium to long-term trade offs wrong - but as for the right measure, it's difficult to say on any given day.

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.