By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Jonah Goldberg wrote a book arguing that we live in part
under a “tyranny of clichés,” and one of the most shopworn of clichés — “The
cure is worse than the disease” — is at the moment at the forefront of our
public discourse. Millions of lives and untold trillions in wealth and income
may be saved — or lost — as the result of public policies shaped by that
cliché.
In the matter of the coronavirus epidemic and our
response to it, the question “Is the cure worse than the disease?” is almost
useless, because it asks us to judge one discrete thing we know against a
half-dozen critical things we do not know.
What we know right now is that the U.S. economy (and the
world economy — which, nationalists note, matters quite a bit to our own
national prosperity) is cratering while the coronavirus still is spreading.
This seems, from the point of view of right this moment, intolerable — or
“unsustainable,” in the antiseptic language of American journalism.
But is it intolerable? It seems intolerable because
it is very painful and because it is very painful right now. As individuals —
and, more important, as a polity — we suffer from what is sometimes known as
“present bias,” meaning that we assign more weight and relevance to things we
are experiencing right now. If you were in possession of a crystal ball that
could tell you the future with absolute reliability, and you learned that
departing from our current course of action would produce both public-health
and economic effects that would be much, much worse than what we are
experiencing right this moment, then the conditions prevailing at right this
moment would not be judged intolerable at all. They would be considered
relatively desirable — relative not to the recent past or to our best hopes for
the future, but relative to a much worse outcome.
In the same way, we go to doctors and pay them great sums
of money to do things to us that would seem intolerable if not for our
knowledge that these horrifying experiences — chemotherapy, for example —
prevent something far worse. If you were just being forced to undergo
chemotherapy with no context, you would believe that you were being tortured by
evil men, not treated by men who wish you well. If you were subjected to the
rigors of military training and military life with no explanation, you would
think you were being abused — not that your apparent tormentors were trying to
save your life.
What we know is that there is economic pain in the
present, and that this is associated with what is at best an imperfect
prophylactic strategy against the coronavirus.
What we do not know makes for a longer list:
1.
We do not know how effective our current
practices are going to be at mitigating the effects of the epidemic. It is even
possible that our current practices will leave us worse off than some other
strategy would have. That is a possibility as a matter of logic; that does not
make it likely, nor does that constitute a case for ignoring the advice of the
relevant experts. If we could know with absolute certainty (or even believe
with overwhelming confidence) that the current course of action is the best one
available to us, then there would be no debate about altering the current
course of action. It may be that we have a high degree of confidence that we
are doing the right thing, but our confidence is not unqualified.
2.
We do not know how deep or long-lasting the
economic damage will be. It may be that the economy is able to come back like
gangbusters once the public-health crisis is under control, that growth will recover
quickly, and that the many Americans who are out of work or who soon will be
out of work are able to return to work at similar wages very quickly. It may be
that the disruption leaves growth stunted for an extended period of time and
that many Americans are unable to find suitable work.
3.
And while we do not know how our current course
of action will work out, we also do not know how any other possible course of
action will work out. And if we choose some other course of action, we will
then be in a position of never being able to know what would have happened if
we had stayed the course.
4.
We do not know what the economic consequences of
a worsening epidemic would be. The measures we are taking right now impose
terrible economic costs, but a catastrophic epidemic — one that is orders of
magnitude worse than what we are experiencing right now — would impose terrible
economic costs, too, on top of an unthinkable amount of death and suffering.
These problems are present in most political
decision-making, albeit usually with lower stakes. We generally misunderstand
the relevant questions — or, as often, we misrepresent the question. For
example, advocates of higher minimum wages will sometimes point to a time and a
place in which a higher minimum wage has been imposed and unemployment either
decreased or at least failed to increase. And then they will say, “This shows
that increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment.” But the
relevant comparison is not between the labor market before the minimum-wage
increase and the labor market after the minimum-wage increase — it is between
the labor market before the minimum-wage increase and the future labor market
that would have existed without the minimum-wage increase. It may be that a
market with 4 percent unemployment before the minimum-wage increase held steady
after a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage; it also may be the case that
without that hike in the minimum wage, the unemployment rate would have dropped
to 3 percent or to 2 percent. This is the right question, but it is a question
that is of no political value, because it cannot be answered with any
confidence.
People in politics are people in the business of
pretending that they have simple answers to complex questions; they are not in
the business of frankly admitting that they do not know what the actual results
of their policies are — or even what they were — and that they have no
way of knowing.
And so we must approach the cliché of the moment — “Is
the cure worse than the disease?” — with a degree of humility. And with a high
degree of caution about the incentives that shape the decisions of political
actors: The authorities in Beijing tried to cover up the facts of the
coronavirus epidemic for reasons of narrow political self-interest — they did
not wish to create a crisis that would undermine the economy. President Trump
made rosy pronouncements about the epidemic in its early days, contradicting
some of his most intelligent advisers, for precisely the same reason. It is
worth keeping in mind that the administration’s efforts to prevent a
stock-market selloff were entirely unsuccessful and that the president’s
optimistic public-health pronouncements did not come to pass. Which is to say,
the effort to stave off present economic pain in the face of some notional
future public-health crisis prevented neither the economic pain nor the
public-health crisis. It would be a bitter thing to repeat such a mistake in
such a short period of time.
When Adolf Hitler was making war on the United Kingdom
and Europe, the question that commanded the attention of the American people
was whether they could trust President Franklin Roosevelt to make the right
decision for the right reason. And the conclusion a great many of them reached
was — “No.” Antiwar sentiment was by no means restricted to cranks and
anti-Semites such as Charles Lindbergh. So intense and widespread was hostility
to entering the war that the Republican nominee, interventionist Wendell
Willkie, felt the need to court (if only halfheartedly) the isolationists,
while President Roosevelt himself was obliged, on the eve of the 1940 election,
to declare: “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. We will
not send our Army, Navy, or air forces to fight in foreign lands, except in
case of attack.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor rendered that promise
moot. Things might have gone differently: Patrick J. Buchanan has
one vision of what might have been, and Philip Roth had another.
The problem for the United States is that there is
unlikely to be a coronavirus Pearl Harbor, a dramatic clarifying event that
points clearly toward the necessary course of action. What we have is Donald
Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell meditating upon a half-understood
cliché and trying to answer unanswerable questions, and trying to do so with
one eye on the ICU and the other on the unemployment office.
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