During the last twenty years, I’ve lived through a series of public crises. 9/11. The Iraq War. The Great Recession. The Syrian Refugee Crisis. ISIS. Systemic sexism (“#MeToo”). Systemic racism. And of course COVID-19.
In each case, society’s demands have been the same.
First, hysteria. We’re all supposed to embrace fear and anger as the leitmotivs of our lives.
Second, herding. We’re all supposed to not merely refrain from criticizing the popular view, but to fervently join the chorus calling for action.
In each case, I have spurned the demands of society. I refuse to get hysterical. I refuse to herd.
For any specific crisis I downplay, strangers usually assume a left- or right-wing motive. Against the War on Terror? Leftist*. Against #MeToo? Rightist.
Those who know a bit about me suspect libertarian wishful thinking: I pretend the world is fine in order to deny the need for decisive government action. In that case, though, shouldn’t I grant the severity of the problems – then blame the government?
A better story is that I’m a contrarian. If most people are incensed about something, I go out of my way to be blasé. To quote The Misanthrope:
What other people think, he can’t abide;
Whatever they say, he’s on the other side;
He lives in deadly terror of agreeing;
‘Twould make him seem an ordinary being.
Indeed, he’s so in love with contradiction,
He’ll turn against his most profound conviction
And with a furious eloquence deplore it,
If only someone else is speaking for it.
Though I love to read these immortal lines aloud, I deny that they describe me. My position, rather, is that society is consistently wrong.
Though the details vary, there are two crucial constants: First, hysteria is absurd; second, herding is reckless.
Let me elaborate. To paraphrase the world’s best graduation speech, trying to figure out what’s going on while high on negative emotions is “as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.” Of course, if you’re the sole person hysterical about your cause, you’ll probably do no harm. But when lots of people are hysterical in the same way, they generally wreak havoc.
That’s right, I stayed calm on 9/11. When Americans started calling for blood on 9/12, I saw horrible writing on the wall. Though not as horrible as the writing turned out – without the Iraq War, we probably wouldn’t have had the Syrian Civil War, ISIS, the refugee crisis, Brexit, or Trump.
Aren’t the public crises I named extremely heterogeneous? Sure, in some ways. The Great Recession directly caused massive global harm. Almost all of the damage of the War on Terror, in contrast, was indirect – the product of a massive overreaction to a statistically tiny evil. Nevertheless, these diverse public crises also share crucial similarities. Most notably:
1. Almost no one carefully measures the severity of these crises until the crisis is practically over. Instead, what drives perceptions is availability bias – well-publicized emotionally gripping anecdotes. The correlation between these anecdotes and the actual size of the problems is low at best.
2. Almost no one seriously asks, “What, if anything, would be a well-tailored response to this crisis?” Instead, societies embrace action bias, rushing to “do something,” flailing about wildly, then gradually lose interest until the next crisis. Perhaps we’re already doing enough about terrorism? Will invading Iraq will make things worse? Maybe we shouldn’t collectively punish refugees or males or whites because a few bad apples do awful, dramatic things? If coronavirus is ten times worse than flu, perhaps we should make ten times as much effort to combat it, not a thousand times? All reasonable questions, yet impotent in a crisis.
If I were in charge, would I have done so much better? Though I’m well-aware of my own self-serving bias, I believe I would have done much better. I wouldn’t have fought the War on Terror, not even in Afghanistan. I would have met the Great Recession with nominal GDP targeting and labor market deregulation, not bailouts and fiscal stimulus. I would have welcomed refugees from the Middle East. I would have enforced existing laws against rape and murder, not start witchhunts for “systemic sexism” or “systemic racism.” And I would have met coronavirus with moderate caution, not shutdowns or putting ten percent of the workforce on welfare.
Yes, perhaps I’m mistaken about one or two of these crises. What is clear, though, is that society’s method of certifying and addressing crises is deeply defective – and that’s highly unlikely to change. While I’ve got to live with that, I get a small sense of comfort from staying aloof from the madness. Staying aloof, and quietly thinking, “You will not stampede me.”
* I have even been publicly accused of being a “communist“!
READER COMMENTS
Garrett
Aug 17 2020 at 11:49am
I’ve only been reading your blog posts for the last five years or so, but I’d like to humbly challenge that you would have instituted NGDP targeting in response to the Great Recession in 2008 only because that was an incredibly contrarian view at that time. You linked to a blog post you wrote in 2013 in support of keeping NGDP at trend, but that was nearly five years after the crisis had abated.
robc
Aug 17 2020 at 1:53pm
He is incredibly contrarian now on many issues (education!) so no reason to believe he wouldn’t have been in 2008.
Garrett
Aug 17 2020 at 2:39pm
He certainly is, I’m just looking for some evidence to support the assertion, ideally a blog post from 2008 or before.
Mark Otaris
Aug 17 2020 at 9:42pm
He advocated it at least as early as 2010 and argued that it was possible at least as early as 2009. An old syllabus suggests he also presented NGDP targeting and a case for the productivity norm in a course in 2000.
Scott Sumner was advocating NGDP targeting and targeting of market forecasts in 1989. George Selgin argued for the productivity norm in 1990 and said it was championed in 1837 by Samuel Bailey!
Garrett
Aug 18 2020 at 10:29am
That syllabus was exactly what I was looking for, thank you!
Bryan, I humbly retract my challenge and believe your claim.
BC
Aug 17 2020 at 11:54am
I’m not sure I see the line from the Iraq War to Trump. It seems to me that Trump was the result of a backlash against political correctness, which in turn traces its roots to the identity politics of Social Justice War (SJW). SJW is not so much a reaction to a crisis, although the most recent round of systemic racism protests was admittedly sparked by the George Floyd incident. Rather, SJW, political correctness, war on systemic sexism and racism, etc. all seem to me part of a multi-decade effort to develop an ideology to rationalize affirmative action and other measures that overtly treat people differently based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Hysteria, fear, and herding do not seem to play a large role in the relatively slow and gradual evolution of SJW. Rather, the relevant phenomenon seems more like a gradual erosion of classical liberal principles that arises when people take for granted the human flourishing enabled by those principles.
Benji C
Aug 17 2020 at 12:55pm
My guess is Bryan’s rationale is similar (but not the same) the non-identity problem, which he posted on recently: https://www.econlib.org/coronavirus-vs-the-non-identity-problem/
The non-identity problem points out that which sperm reaches the egg to create life is basically random and, so it doesn’t make sense to ask “what would my life be like in this alternate timeline” because you wouldn’t exist if the timeline branched before your birth.
I suspect Bryan’s point is that there’s radical uncertainty in how history unfolds. Trump becoming president was extremely close and, a priori, unlikely, so in the counterfactual universe without the Iraq War (a huge and consequential change), it’s very unlikely that Trump is still president even if the causal chain from “Iraq War” to “Trump elected” is vague.
More directly to your point, the causal chain isn’t that vague: part of the evolution of SJW culture was rooted in the treatment of Muslims during the war on terror – surveillance, indefinite detention, and enhanced interrogation domestically and at Guantanamo + increasing concern over the Iraqi casualties as American support for the war dwindles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War). I think it’s reasonable to speculate that without the war in Iraq, the US would likely be less polarized on SJW lines or at least things would look different enough that Trump couldn’t capitalize on anti-PC backlash quite as effectively. Keep in mind that just a small reduction in Trump’s support means he never becomes president.
A
Aug 17 2020 at 12:43pm
Is a moral panic sometimes necessary to bring about change? What if anti-police riots were a panic in that the specific problem stated was exaggerated in the press and public mind, but it led to genuinely needed police reform?
Jon Murphy
Aug 17 2020 at 2:06pm
While a moral panic may bring about desirable change (however one wants to define that), I’d argue that a moral panic is unlikely to bring out such change. As Bryan points out, decision-makers are under immense pressure to “do something” during a moral panic. Furthermore, given the “moral” nature of the moral panic, there is pressure to go to the extremes (less anything falling short of the extreme be considered showing ideological impurity).
The great moral panics of 2020 (COVID, BLM, etc) have done more to destroy venerable (though flawed) institutions, such as the rule of law, rather than produce any positive change.
Julian
Aug 18 2020 at 6:48am
Giving in to such tantrums sets the wrong incentives in society. It sends the message that, if you really care about an issue, burn and destroy and you’ll likely have your way.
Truth is, talks about police reform began even before the riots broke, that very night of George Floyd’s death. And most Americans were sympathetic to it, and so reforms were likely to ensue, especially in blue cities.
What the rioting and the frenzy managed to do, however, is push the Overton window for even more radical reforms, which, as soon as they started to get implemented, produced spikes in violent crime rates that have caused way more deaths than any kind police violence could ever result in in a year’s time. In the same way the irrational, post 9/11 moral panic caused trillions of dollars of unnecessary losses in treasure and thousands in lives. In the same way the irrational Me-Too moral panic caused men in high positions to steer clear from mentoring women below them, likely depriving them of further advancement.
In other words, irrational overreactions do more harm than good, as most irrational behavior does.
Paul A Sand
Aug 17 2020 at 3:30pm
On a whim, we recently watched the Marx Brothers movie Horsefeathers. Which has, among other things… “I’m Against It“
Shane L
Aug 18 2020 at 11:17am
I mostly agree, but there are a small number of real crises for which we don’t have the luxury of thoughtful consideration, and where doing nothing will likely lead to devastation. I suspect highly infectious disease, with the potential to grow at an exponential rate, is an example.
Don Boudreaux
Aug 18 2020 at 10:00pm
Shane L:
Serious question: Why is “doing nothing” equated with absence of action by government? Why is it assumed that if the state does nothing then, ipso facto, “we” do nothing? Do people act meaningfully only through the state?
Shane L
Aug 19 2020 at 7:07am
Right, Don. But I take it that some kinds of crises require coercion, such as quarantine.
Thomas Hutcheson
Aug 18 2020 at 6:31pm
I feel similarly, but the problem is that just pointing out that society is wrong is not enough. We need to promote the optimal or at least less bad response to these “crises.” “Don’ t do B; do A” is more likely to get one’s arguments against B taken seriously that ‘Just Say ‘No.'”
And of course it helps if one has been arguing to A all along. The time to argue for a carbon tax/higher EITC is now, not the day before the “Green New Deal/higher minimum wage is about to pass Congress. If we already had an unemployment insurance scheme that replaced a hefty fraction of workers lost income, we would not have to fight off the PPP and the state unemployment top up.
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