Collective action a utopian fantasy

Centralised control merely gives off the illusion of victory over COVID-19 and is bound to result in an expensive failure. By Nick Cater.

Two days after Jacinda Ardern declared her country coronavirus-free, the thorny little blighter is back proving that finger-wagging is less effective than some imagined in a global pandemic.

The results of a parallel experiment in Victoria are certain to be equally disappointing for, while lockdowns might give the illusion of victory, peace cannot be sustained forever.

The lesson from Ardern’s failed experiment in elimination is that we should lower our expectations of what a public health response can achieve. It is a reminder of the limits of central planning and the imperfect wisdom of experts, particularly when wrestling with a challenge as complex as COVID-19. Friedrich Hayek was right as usual. Governments perform best when the task is simple. The more complicated the challenge and the greater the hubris, the more likely the chance of an expensive failure.

The refusal of coronavirus to behave in the way favoured epidemiologists predicted, at a time when a second wave of transmissions appears to be breaking, presents us with a policy dilemma.

Do we continue with the extreme social distancing and restricted movement that has plunged the world into a recession with only limited success? Or do we look for more modest, less interventionist measures, like fast-tracking development of potential cures and new forms of testing that could give rapid results?

In a recently published essay, economist Mark Pennington draws on the wisdom of Hayek to explain why a singular technical solution based on the advice of fearmongering epidemiologists was bound to fail. Epidemiology relies on models, built upon imperfect knowledge about the behaviour of virus, and even more imperfect knowledge of the behaviour of people.

The theory that a lockdown would eliminate community transmission does not allow for imperfect decisions by bureaucrats or the wayward behaviour of security guards. It does not take into account the possibility a successful first lockdown could starve the population of herd immunity, making a larger, less controlled second outbreak more likely. It cannot predict the degree of non-compliance or when reserves of public spirit might be exhausted.

These are matters better understood by economists whose advice has been brushed aside too readily in the panic about contagion. While epidemiology invites purely technical solutions and treats people as chess pieces, economics recognises people have momentum of their own and attempts to study their movements. Economists wrestle with the trade-offs required in allocating resources and weigh benefits of misery avoided against the cost of misery caused through loneliness, mental illness, unemployment, bankruptcy and deaths from other causes.

We can expect bigger and even costlier mistakes if we leave the health experts in charge of critical public policy decisions, a position they have been reluctant to relinquish. They have been afforded an almost unlimited budget and their words have been treated as gospel. They have stood like poker-faced statues bestowing gravitas on premiers. Their best advice has been useful, helping steady the nerves of leaders. The damage caused by the advice of some, however, will take time to assess. The lockdown strategy was most forcefully pushed in March by epidemiologists whose doomsday predictions of up to 150,000 deaths in Australia were grossly wide of the mark.

An alternative approach to lockdown is to simply muddle through until COVID-19 retreats into the history books. Muddling through has never been an easy strategy to sell in politics, yet it frequently satisfies policy aims quicker and with fewer mistakes.

It was good enough for Hayek, who was more comfortable with uncertainty than today’s sages.

“I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false,” he said.

Muddling through, by conducting multiple experiments, building on successes and learning from failures, is the essence of innovation. It is the way humans have learned to make incremental improvements and make more out of what we have at our disposal. It is the approach pursued by medical scientists who are experimenting with the repurposing of existing drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

Promising results from trials have been brusquely dismissed by the medical establishment. Their views are echoed by the radical left, which favours eradicating the virus through social action as a precursor to saving the world.

An academic quoted recently on the ABC’s science page dismissed hydroxychloroquine as “a political drug … an immediate and individualistic solution that could appeal to those on the right … in opposition to more left-leaning values around social responsibility”. “It doesn’t imply we have to work together — and with government — and address larger, more complex, interrelated issues in society to battle the disease.”

Yet rather than ramp up government intervention, we should be winding it back. “States that have assumed significant control over resource allocation during the pandemic may be reluctant to relinquish their powers,” writes Pennington. Those who wish to see an expanded role for government will be egging them on.

If the challenge of managing the pandemic wasn’t big enough, we are now urged to think of it as part of an even bigger problem. The expansion of the role of government in the past six months has put fire into bellies. A communal response to the pandemic has become a model for eliminating other evils like climate change, racism and global inequality.

Eliminating COVID through collective action, with or without the help of medical science, shares all the characteristics of previous utopian projects. It is a single-minded quest for perfection resting on the ability of government to implement transformational change. It will be more expensive and more likely to fail than the eradication of a mere virus.