One does not have to spend a lot of time on political Twitter or following the latest in punditry or among one’s engaged “friends” on Facebook to see that many if not most such people have precisely identified which politicians and which pandemic policy responses and omissions have been catastrophic failures or glorious successes. If you consort with “both sides” and read pundits with whom you rarely agree, you know it when you see it. There has been so much of this that it makes no sense to link examples.
Our own view is that it will be some time — probably after the United States presidential election, unfortunately — before we will know which policies will have worked at an acceptable cost, and which will have worked, or failed, at “too high” a cost. But as early studies do emerge, there will be a meta-struggle, mostly promoted by partisans seeking narrative dominance, about the best way way to measure relative success, failure, and cost.
Herewith, we propose a few measures of ultimate success or failure.
Ultimately, we will know three things in each applicable jurisdiction (itself a hot topic, of which a bit more below): (1) excess deaths (whether from the virus or the stress of the economy and confinement or from local collapse of the healthcare system) over the baseline experience, (2) excess morbidity and mental health problems, and (3) the decline in the jurisdiction’s GDP per capita against the baseline. Those three things in a given country or state will be the indicators of success or failure.
Now, there will be many arguments to be had in that big partisan quarrel to dominate the narrative. How to compare jurisdictions? How to weigh the value of excess lives lost vs. non-lethal physical and mental health and social problems vs. GDP? (And if you are one of those shallow thinkers who recoil with disgust at the idea that we would measure lives in dollars, please go read some other moron’s blog.) How to attribute the effects of public policy to overlapping jurisdiction in a federal system? How much credit should be given to cultural propensity to follow the direction of governmental, business, and social leaders? What was the role of private sector responses and innovation, and should political leaders get the credit for it?
Regarding jurisdictions, we’ve noticed that people who truly hate President Trump without fail want to compare the policy and social responses in the United States, as a whole, to Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland and — if the milk of intellectual honesty compels the concession — Germany. Expect Republicans to compare red states with blue states, or the outcomes for Republican governors compared to Democrats (knowing full well that Republican governors preside over more wide open spaces), or New York State to Lombardy. All such comparisons would be — how you say? — rubbish. Or, if you prefer fruity metaphors, “apples to oranges.”
Having dabbled a bit in social science and having, er, gleaned more than enough from an erstwhile mother-in-law who was a professor of sociology, we say with at least the usual blogger’s expertise that the accepted method would be to identify “paired” jurisdictions with similar known parameters that turn out to matter. Competent social scientists can and will identify pairings among relevantly similar states and between countries to measure the effectiveness of policy responses. Suppose (for the sake of argument) it turns out that the attributes in a jurisdiction most closely correlated with excess mortality are average or median age, poverty, obesity, and density of the population in proximity to heavy travel flows from Europe and China. It might be silly to compare New York and Texas, but it might make sense to compare Florida and Texas. It might be pointless to compare Iowa and Illinois avec Chicago, but it might make sense to compare Iowa with Illinois excluding Chicago and the “collar counties.” Or Minnesota and Wisconsin or the Dakotas with each other. You get the point.
As for the rest of our questions and the many more we have not considered, file them away so you can detect partisan nonsense from actual scholarship in the months to come.
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