We seem to be entering what you might call a preference cascade. Many unspeakable truths suddenly are being spoken all over the place.
In the Covid era, the Biden administration and its state-level allies have made a hard pivot away from the nudge approach towards an embrace of mandates. The presumed justification for this shift is that the severity of the Covid crisis required more drastic measures. But something else differentiates Covid technocracy from its predecessors: a remarkable incuriosity about whether the strictures it imposes actually work. This incuriosity has become all the more glaring in recent weeks, as Omicron has brought cases to unprecedented levels in cities like New York, where both vaccine passports and mask mandates are in effect.
The nudge approach, on the other hand, is at least ostensibly outcome-oriented: it assesses interventions on the basis of their measurable impact. So one of the problems with mandates, from the nudgers’ perspective, is that they risk conflating intention and outcome. Mandates are often difficult to enforce and generate backlashes, and thus may prove counterproductive. But they may remain in force, despite failing to achieve their objectives, because they demonstrate a moral commitment to a desired aim.
And as Zients’s holiday announcement demonstrated, when mandates fail to achieve the desired results, it is the fault of those who don’t follow the rules, not those who imposed them. A more empirical approach would treat the reality of noncompliance as part of what needs to be measured in order to assess the efficacy of a proposed policy. But such a strategy would imply that the technocrats themselves, rather than the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers, should be held accountable for policy failures. Small wonder it has fallen out of favour.
Before last year it might have seemed obvious that the guiding ethos of technocracy was cold utilitarian calculus, but in the past two years it has become something like the opposite: moral fervour. Various factors brought about this shift, but the reaction of the technocrats and their constituency to Trump, with his “war on the administrative state” and love of the “poorly educated”, was arguably the crucial one. Tinkering behind the scenes, as was favoured in the Obama era, was no longer a viable approach for a class that felt its interests threatened.
Early on in the pandemic, the writer Alex Hochuli described the pandemic as “technocracy’s end-of-life rally”. At least temporarily, it had put the experts maligned over the previous half-decade back in the drivers’ seat. But the populist fervour that had driven the Trump movement re-energised itself in reaction to lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Initially, this seemed to place the technocrats in an unassailable position, since they could impugn their allies as aiders and abettors of disease and death.
5 comments:
The reasoning is rock-solid at first because it is theory, until it falls into the usual downfall of trying to guess the motives of others, which only happens when the Others are doing something they don't like. There is still no evidence that nudging would work better, only handwaving that gee, it obviously must, because...reasons, with the rationale that previous efforts "did not work" which is a false conclusion because it is based on inadequate evidence. Every one of the recent articles I have seen make the same error of not even considering the possibility that the Delta variant may have indeed be much worse - which is, after all the main claim that should be addressed. Every. One.
Imagine this essay as a court hearing in which only the prosecution gets to speak, and even at that has more than half of its evidence as speculation.
I started out much in favor of nudging, for the theoretical reasons given about backlash. I still don't see evidence in the other direction either, that mandates will increase vaccination more than a bit. Yet if we are looking for evidence of what "doesn't work," school systems relying on parents to get their children vaccinated against other illnesses, a stunningly obvious benefit, didn't work, and just telling people that drunk driving was a bad idea had only limited effectiveness as well.
When Arthur Koestler was still a Communist, he was given some advice by Stalin's master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg:
"Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!"
And that is the approach taken by most of the 'communications' efforts from he Left, not only those Covid-related.
Lots of leeway here. If there was ever a bill that had opportunity to evade the spirit of the law, this is it. I have this funny feeling things will not go as planned.
By now, the people who have decided they do not want the vex are not uninformed, or negligent, or just have not gotten around to it. Many of them are people who have done a lot of research, looked outside the blizzard of MSN propaganda, and concluded it is a experimental therapy that carries grave risk, for a problem that is mind numbingly overblown. These people tend to be independent, creative and tenacious.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/bill-filed-washington-authorize-strike-force-involuntarily-detain-unvaccinated-families-already-set-internment-camps/
Is the idea that the lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates were good policy until Delta hit, and then Delta turned out to be so much more contagious or vaccine-resistant (if not more severe) that we should all have acknowledged those strategies were now useless and should be abandoned? That's not what happened, unfortunately. It's almost as if the argument were that it's not the "fault" of the mandates, because we didn't expect Delta to be so much worse, so we should double down on strategies even when they didn't produce the results they were intended to produce, even while they produced just the costs we feared they would. Are we trying to be fair to a theory (and/or its proponents), or produce good results on the ground for people?
I think we have clear evidence that heavy-handed mandates spark a stubborn resistance and suspicion. It's possible that resistance and suspicion would have arisen from some other cause if we hadn't chosen the heavy-handed approach, but why make that assumption? Why not just try a less heavy-handed approach and find out? After all, that's how we approach most vaccines, and it's worked reasonably well so far, despite pockets of resistance here and there.
The approach reminds me of explanations that schools should receive higher and higher levels of funding despite failing to show improved results, because it's "not the teachers' fault" that the kids are incapable of learning, it's society, it's the parents, it's lead paint, whatever. The fact remains that the proposed strategy is expensive and not yielding the intended results. That alone should be reason enough to quit forcing the strategy on an unwilling public. It doesn't really matter that we strongly suspect the strategy should have worked and only failed because this or that guy did bad thing A or B, unless we think we have a strategy to get them to quit doing A or B.
Keep banning the unspeakable. Maybe this time Ymar's apocalypse will go away.
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