“Whatever else government does, the trick it absolutely has to pull off, according to Hobbes, is to make us afraid of breaking the rules while ensuring that we have no real cause to panic about our survival.”
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.
In my family, it's the old folks who are most worried about the lockdown. I shouldn't imply I'm in favor of it, I'm pretty strongly opposed, but my and my parents' generation ultimately know we have good times to look forward to. My grandparents are starting to worry that, you know, am I signing up to do this for the rest of my life?
You believe the majority will rather keep their parents for a few more years than a functioning economy? Intuitively, I'm pretty sure everybody will say "of course, I love my parents". If they think about it for a while, I don't believe that they will. I'm not sure the old people would either.
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.
“The total absence of citizens combined with the presence of protective officials gives the city an air of being under a permanent state of siege. It could almost be a depiction of David Hume’s remark, a century later, that military camps ‘are the true mothers of cities’.”
Question: Where should one start in reading David Hume?
If you're looking for a crash course on him as a political thinker, you could check out the selections that seem of interest to you from his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary[0]. If you want a more specific list (and a reasonably coherent reading order):
* '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.")
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.
I originally assumed it wasn't a woodcut because the woodcuts I've seen were mostly simpler, and I confirmed it by googling the artist. I now know that woodcuts can rival etchings in complexity, but looking at the biography of the artist he was an etcher who copied the engraved style. The British Museum confirms itsw an etching https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1867-1012-...
>> And, right in the middle of the frontispiece, there are two figures wandering the empty city. Their clothes identify them as plague doctors, with their characteristic beaked masks, containing herbs or sponges soaked in vinegar to filter the air.
Alternatively, they could be two people with long, pointy hoods stylized to point backwards.
The emphasis of plague doctors in that cover is pretty consistent with the things a state will face. Plague has been an essential factor in all government since beginning of time. There even is biblical trilemma for rulers that is basically the option of three days of plauge, three months of fleeing from your enemies, or three years of famine. The answer is rip the band-aid off and accept the plague casualties because the alternatives cost you your kingdom. You can see this playing out now as countries balance lockdowns against the risk of becoming economic clients of larger or powers or losing economic incumbency, and causing a generation lost to a severe depression.
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.
Things like vaccines and ICU units didn't exist in Biblical times so perhaps 2000 years of progress has had some effect on the calculus of such an issue.
Not really. Vaccines help you prevent an outbreak from reoccuring; it's unlikely one would be created in time to stop an ongoing one. ICUs help minimize causalties. Neither one is a qualitative change in terms of handling a sudden outbreak. We got better at handling pandemics, but the playbook is mostly still the same - identify and isolate infected, and wait it out.
the point is we want the hospitals to stay available to the general public. this means reducing the speed of the disease's progress allows this resource to stay available.
I hate to bet against human stupidity, but yeah, essentially this virus will not cause famine. It just doesn't require that many people to grow and distribute food these days.
(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.
I think you haven't been following supply chain news recently. Or what UN says. There's absolutely going to be famine in less developed countries, and much higher food prices and lower variety in the coming months in developed countries.
No, you're right, I was being provincial, just talking about North America.
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.
Yeah, it won't come to cannibalism in North America. But I would be worried about pork prices if I were you. Or really, all food prices.
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.
I agree with you, caveats abound. (As a Permaculture enthusiast the whole agricultural system looks like one big caveat to me! But that's a tangent.) I hope people and information come together well enough to mitigate the worst of the waste and shortages.
(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.)
I think it's fair to say that famine can't happen in areas with access to modern agricultural technology. (Which is a very real difference; until modern times there was no country so rich or productive that it didn't have to worry about famine.)
But NYC doesn’t have such access. Only a small portion of the population does. The rest only have access to supply chains.
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.
> "What continues to shock me about HN is how many people seem to think there's a choice between casualties and economic harm."
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.
> 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.
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:
> 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.
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.
I don't disagree with any of that and, again personally, I hope the poll numbers stay that favorable. Nothing would delight me more than the public behaving in a sensible fashion.
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.
I'm personally in favour of incremental re-openings in stages because today's tech and ability to co-ordinate gives us real data on their impact.
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 "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.
That is a bit of an oversimplification. Lockdowns don't go on forever, so what we are considering are the criteria for ending. There are other mitigations already proven and more on the way. Currently distancing, handwashing, masks, testing, and contact tracing have shown significant ability to reduce flare ups. Additionally various drugs targeting either the virus or its interactions with humans are coming available and there is already one vaccine beginning trials. These lockdowns began when initial counts of infected and killed suggested and extremely high rate of infection. Since then we have come to understand that appearance of a high initial rate was in part caused by the virus escaping into the general population earlier than realized. Perhaps most important there is now data from populations not locking down, locking down modestly, locking down strictly, and ending lockdown and there is very little evidence that lockdowns are having a strong effect. It is long understood by virologists and epidemiologists that if an infectious agent spreads to the general population lockdowns cease to have a demonstrable positive effect.
Source on the virus escaping into the population earlier than thought being a cause of high initial infection rate numbers? If you don't mind. I'm honestly curious
That is actually a difficult question to answer properly. At a high level I have been following COVID-19 through many sources, primarily summaries on University of California Television and Ivor Cummins on YouTube and then going from there to reading the most notable studies. It is fairly basic, though. If you look at early data we were going from just a few cases to many quite quickly and it makes sense that extrapolation from the first small numbers ended up being off.
>> What continues to shock me about HN is how many people seem to think there's a choice between casualties and economic harm.
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:
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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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.