Friday, December 25, 2020

COVID-19 as preparation for climate change

Last update: Sunday 12/27/20 


This note is a neoskeptic's plea for public accountability in our quest for resolutions of "wicked" problems like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Now more than ever, we must be wary of experts bearing unchallenged certainties.


In its discussion of "wicked" problems, Wikipedia offers the following succinct definition:
"In planning and policy, a "wicked" problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. "

I suggest that experts are likely to make two kinds of serious errors, horizontal and vertical, when addressing "wicked" problems. 

  • Horizontal errors -- Not recognizing the "wickedness" of the problem, the experts redefine the problem so that it falls within the narrow boundaries of their expertise; they are oblivious to negative consequences of their recommendations that might have been foreseen by other kinds of experts.

  • Vertical errors -- Not recognizing the "wickedness" of the problem, the experts identify solutions at the wrong levels of decision making because of their own inexperience with decisions at higher or lower levels.

The White House coronavirus task force made both kinds of errors. Climate change is, arguably, a far more "wicked" problem than the COVID pandemic. That's why I am fearful that whatever kind of overarching policy mechanism -- task force, intra-governmental coordinating committee, etc  -- is assigned to supervise our efforts to address climate change, it will also make both kinds of errors, but with far worse unforeseen consequences than the errors of the COVID task force unless we citizens generate vigorous public challenges to their expert certainties.


COVID-19 horizontal error
In my opinion, the White House task force made a catastrophic horizontal error in mid-March 2020 on its daytime TV show when it appealed to everyone in the country to shelter at home if they were not essential workers. 
  • At that time there were less than 20,000 infected persons in all fifty states, and significant numbers of infections were only evident in a handful of states. Instead of appealing to the residents of the handful of impacted states, the task force appealed to everyone.

  • This national lockdown was not mandatory, but a substantial percentage of the  residents  -- 30 percent? 40 percent? 50 percent? -- in all fifty states sheltered at home. The aggregate impact of these millions of individual decisions dealt a devastating, long-lasting blow to local economies in all 50 states. Unemployment soared to more than 30 million and cost trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep it from soaring even higher.

  • Economists would have easily foreseen this disastrous "side effect", but the task force of medical experts was oblivious ... or they assumed that their "heroic measures" to save thousands of lives were justified even though they wrecked the financial well-being of millions. if the virus had been rampaging throughout all 50 states at that time, their "heroic measures" might have been defensible; but it wasn't. I provide a detailed review of this lock step national lockdown and other task force blunders in another note on this blog:

    "Where do we go from here?", Last update: 10/30/20

COVID-19 vertical error
Most of the U.S. population accepted the guidelines of the Trump task force in principle, but a substantial minority rejected some of the requirements, especially face masks. Of those who accepted the guidelines, many lapsed back into old habits from time to time, especially while on vacations or holidays. The inevitable consequence was the series of higher and higher spikes and surges in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths that have occurred since March 2020.

In my opinion, these rejections and lapses resulted from a catastrophic vertical error that began with the appointment of the task force members in February 2020. Once this distinguished group of medical experts developed the guidelines for social mitigation, their medical expertise had minimum value added. They were no longer the right messengers, so they should have stepped aside; but they didn't.  Let me explain.
  • In previous notes on this blog, I have referred to the conflict between social mitigation guidelines and our lifelong social and workplace habits. I was wrong. The conflict goes much deeper. Aristotle got it right over 2500 years ago when he declared that man is a social animal. To paraphrase Aristotle, we are pack doggies who are genetically compelled to eat together, work together, play together, and cuddle close together on cold winter nights. It's not that we want to do these things; we are wired from birth with powerful evolutionary compulsions to do these things.

  • Therefore the most important professionals in the effective management of a pandemic via social mitigation would not be nationally renowned medical experts. The most important professionals would be local community leaders who had the people skills required to induce an overwhelming majority of the members of their communities to adhere to the mitigation guidelines for long periods of time. Medical experts don't have these skills. The leaders who have them are known by different names, e.g., activists, community activists, community organizers, evangelists.

  • In another post on this blog I suggested an alternative model: a small national task force of senior administrators who would coordinate the efforts of state level administrators. The state level administrators would coordinate the efforts of hundreds (thousands?) of local activists in their counties, cities, towns, and villages who would use social media to organize grass roots efforts to obtain maximum compliance with the guidelines.

    "We need a different kind of coronavirus task force", Last update: 11/28/20
    .

Trusting "the science"
The members of the Trump task force repeatedly claimed that their recommendations were based on "the science", their implication being that the public should trust that whatever they said was true because anything based on science must be true. This demand for public trust might have been plausible if their recommendations had no significant impact beyond what was predicted by "the science", i.e., by a specific biological science or by a cluster of related biological sciences. 

Unfortunately, their mid-March recommendation that everyone in the entire country shelter at home, other than essential workers, dealt a devastating blow to the local economies of all fifty states, a highly significant outcome that no biological science could have predicted, but an outcome that would have been anticipated by the most rudimentary economic analysis. This dire potential outcome should have been given a thorough public review before they made their recommendation. 

In their perfervid zeal to cure the nation as quickly as possible of a virus that has not yet proven itself to be as deadly on a per capita basis as the 1918 Spanish Flu, the task force ignored the common sense observation that a cure should not be worse than the disease. Nowadays we have regulations that prevent doctors from invoking "heroic measures" to save a patient's life without the patient's consent. The pandemic "policy doctors" on the task force should have been required to receive the public's consent before they inflicted financial ruin on the lives of tens of millions in their quest to save the lives of hundreds of thousands. Of course, this consent should have been framed as a choice between the national lockdown proposed by the task force versus only locking down the handful of states that had substantial numbers of COVID infections in March 2020.

Beyond this, the expertise of the members of the task force in "the science" did not qualify them to assume leading roles in ongoing efforts to induce an overwhelming majority of the population to adhere to mitigation guidelines for long periods of time. As noted in the previous section of this discussion, medical experts don't have the necessary people skills. The recurring spikes and surges in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths since March 2020 were the measures of their failures. Social mitigation was the right message, but members of the task force were the wrong messengers who used the wrong media. They conveyed their messages via network and cable TV shows that were watched by the elderly and middle aged primary targets of the virus, but were unwatched by its young asymptomatic spreaders. (Do young people watch television anymore?) The nationally renowned task force should have stepped aside in deference to grass roots activists who possessed the needed skills.

Climate change
Climate change is a far more "wicked" problem than the COVID-19 pandemic because it will present us with a far greater number of horizontal and vertical challenges than COVID. Its successful management is likely to require profoundly disruptive changes in where we live, what we eat, where we play, where we learn, where we work, what we do at work, and how we travel from our homes to places outside our homes. 

Different aspects of this wide range of activities will be the focus of different kinds of scientific specializations. So it's possible that highly recommended changes devised by one kind of expert may produce highly undesirable "side effects" that will be flagged by other kinds of experts. And as happened with COVID, there may be a bias towards addressing issues at the federal level that might be better handled by state and local actors.

We can anticipate that the required changes will entail huge costs and benefits. These costs and benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed throughout our society. Therefore the most important players will be the national, state, and local leaders who have the political skills required to negotiate workable deals with other leaders that facilitate these disruptions in ways that benefit most segments of our society, not just the fortunate few. In essence, the deals will require the winners of the benefits to compensate the losers for their costs.

Finally, as we turn our energies towards climate change, our mismanagement of the COVID pandemic should serve as a stark reminder of the importance of public accountability.

  • To quote the concise phrasing of an unknown wit, "In God we trust, but everyone else must bring data". The members of the task force demanded a level of trust they had not earned. None of them had any prior experience managing such a lethal and easily contracted virus in a highly developed country like ours. So their repeated calls for our trust in their interpretations of "the science" were unjustified.

  • They should have been required to justify their recommendations, not just to the president, but to our elected representatives in public hearings in both branches of Congress, especially recommendations that might have devastating effects on most of our local economies or impose drastic restrictions on our daily lives far greater than were imposed on the lives of U.S. civilians in World War II.

If we fail to learn from our pandemic errors, we will mismanage climate change so badly that within a few decades most of us will be living in an apocalyptic dystopia.

Roy L Beasley, PhD
Editor, Neoskeptics blog


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