Learning the Obvious.

 The Walsh Park prophet has publishes a list of Highlights From The Last Twenty Years Of Political Theory   It is amazing how many of this blogger's highlights are repudiating ideas which are quite simply extremely dumb:

It was once a widespread assumption in political theory that economic growth and political and democratic freedoms were necessarily linked. The experience of China... has deeply shaken that truism in democratic theory. Similarly, in the 1990s shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was widely believed that democratic capitalism was the inevitable path towards the future. See "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) by Francis Fukuyama

Even at the time, which I can remember quite well, many people would have doubted this - Greens, Marxists, even some conservatives (e.g. John Gray).  In fact one might ask, who exactly did believe it?  American third way liberals, and conservatives when it suited them.

Another example:

There has been a lot of development in understanding that the model in which people form political views (and change them) based upon a rational analysis of evidence presented to them is inaccurate and misleading.

Who believed that?  Any ancient orator could have told them this is rubbish, but if that is too remote, try Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it

or William Jennings Bryan

It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest; the only way to deal with him is to outvote him.

or, from the UK this time, C.E.M. Joad:

You can’t get a parson to admit the arguments of an agnostic, because his salary depends on his not letting the agnostic refute him

(all quotes h/t/ quoteinvestigator)

In fact, I find it hard to believe anything so stupid could have been a received opinion, even amongst 90's liberals yet so it is claimed by someone who knows the field much better than I do.

Update 18/01/2022:  Prune some lengthy sentences.

Also, I note the Walsh Park prophet was not alone in all this. Apparently, Sir Alex Younger, retired head of MI6, said in a speech about China: "We got it wrong... The idea that as they matured and became richer they were going to become more like us is for the birds"

Indeed, and it always was.

(The article on Sir Alex Younger's speech on the BBC website mysteriously disappeared, so for a non-paywalled reference you will have to slum it at the Daily Express here.)

Big fish in little ponds.

(Click to see original)

The secret attraction of Brexit:  if the pond is small enough the minnow is king.

Seen today (click on author's name for link):

WEB ONLY / VIEWS » JULY 14, 2020

There Is No Plan (For You)

Unemployment, evictions, business failure, a pandemic and health crises are all here at once. The federal government doesn’t care.

BY HAMILTON NOLAN  

Surely this does no more than reflect the fact that American capital is uniquely little dependent on American workers.

Update 03/08/2023:  Thinking about the UK, maybe it's not so unique.

Extending the American empire in the US.

Quite shocking to see some of the film of police violence coming out of the US over the past week.  It seems amazing that the Americans, who pride themselves so loudly on being free, should apparently with a police force that behaves so like an occupying army.  The answer surely is that most, or at least most white,  Americans did not expect it to be used against them. As numerous writers have pointed out, state violence against all manner of groups in America is not new, most particularly against black or Native Americans, but let us not forget the Sedition Act.

However, it is a novelty to see a senior general parading around Washington DC in combat garb, to see massed ranks of no-one quite knows who, but some security force anyway, standing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and certainly to see American generals issuing statements reminding the world that they have sworn an oath to defend the country's Constitution.  In America's empire, no, that would not be surprising, or maybe surprising because so restrained.  But in the US itself, that is another matter.

Of course the USA always contained plenty of outsiders, shown only the stick and not the carrot, but handling them could generally be left to local forces.  Now it seems that that is not enough.  Why the change?

The rage in America now is surely that a large number of Americans who in the past have considered themselves system insiders, among those to whom the system shows its nice face, are worrying that they may actually be outsiders.

And behind that is the material fact that American capital is less dependent on American workers for its profits, either in the guise of workers or that of consumers.

Updated 18/01/2022 to correct some typos and make the language less ponderous.

Overachievement

Therefore, those who win every battle are not really skillful - those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.  (Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War', tr. Thomas Cleary, p.69).

They may be the most skilful generals, but they are certainly not the most skilful bureaucrats.

In all the endless commentary on Covid 19 I have seen very little written about the cost of lockdowns in terms of physical and mental health - a certain amount on the problems facing the victims of domestic abuse, the odd other article, and all that only after the lockdown was introduced.  As time goes on, though, and people chafe under these restrictions, that will surely change.

At this point, if the number of fatalities is very low - say, fewer than die from flue in a mildish flue season, in the UK 2,000 or so - then the government will be vulnerable to the charge of having over-reacted.  On the other hand, if death toll is catastrophic - say over 200,000 - the government will face a barrage of (justified) criticism for failing to protect the public.

From the point of view of the government's political advantage, therefore, there seems to be a golden mean associated with any course of action: the more costly its actions to combat the epidemic the more damage caused by the epidemic it needs to able to point to in order to fend off know-it-all critics after the event.

Accordingly, the more successful the lockdown is at suppressing the virus, the more difficult it will be to maintain it for any length of time: the its cost will grow at a linear rate or worse, while the virus-caused fatalities by hypothesis would increase very slowly.  Thus the pressure to release the lockdown would probably quite quickly become overwhelming.  It seems to me that the government's advisors recognise this - it would account for some otherwise strange comments about starting the lockdown 'too soon' - but their solution of stopping and restarting a lockdown, as if the country could be closed and reopened like an accordion, seems unrealistic.

Presumably, therefore, the UK will eventually be pushed into trying a test-and contain strategy like Thomas Pueyo's 'Hammer and Dance' ( click here ).  Why, though, are the UK authorities - apparently - so reluctant to try this?  Maybe time will tell.

More Viral Arithmetic

'Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face' 
(Attr. to Mike Tyson.)


After the UK Prime Minister's press conference two days ago (12th March) on Covid19, people have started to understand the scale of the epidemic foreseen by the British government; for example the Independent published an article yesterday crunching the arithmetic: to get herd immunity requires at least 60% of the population to become infected with the virus; in the UK that is 39 million people, so if the CFR is 1% this would give 398,000 fatalities. (Note - as I recall, only last week the government warned the Scottish government to expect 100,000 fatalities in the worst case).

It has to be admitted that the UK government's naming of the 4 stages of its Covid19 plan - containment, delay, mitigation and research - was confusing, as it is clear that since the third week of February (at the latest) the government's aim has been not to contain the virus in the UK but to delay the epidemic - well before it officially moved from the 'containment' to the 'delay' stage on 12th March.  It is, therefore, not surprising that many are unhappy and shocked.

However, all the comment which I have seen has been about the total number of infections, but the rate of infection the government seems to foresee is hardly less eye watering.

If  we assume a total of 40 million infections in the 1st wave of the epidemic (fractionally over 60% of the UK population), and that 50% of the infections occur in a three week peak, that gives an average of nearly 1 million infections a day during the peak three weeks.  It is expected that about 5%  of those infected become critically ill - 50,000 a day for three weeks in a country with 4,000 ICU beds, of which 80% are currently in use.  How is that not going to overwhelm the NHS?  And we know from Italy and Hubei that if a health service is overwhelmed the case fatality rate rises.  But even at 1% CFR you could expect maybe 10,000 per day in the worst period.

However, long before that, if China appears to have suppressed the epidemic with say 5,000 casualties overall, I cannot see the UK government sticking to its current plan, no matter how resolved to do so it is now.

Viral Arithmetic

The UK government announced its plan to deal with NCovid19 two days ago on 3rd March, and there has been surprisingly little comment on how enormous an epidemic HM government expects to see here.

The plan envisages the disease affecting up to 80% of the population with a 1% case fatality rate. Using the ONS's figure of  66.4 million for the UK's population (in mid-2018 -  click here ) it appears that the UK government is expecting up to 53 million cases of infection and up to 530,000 fatalities - a little short of 90% of the number of deaths that occur in the UK in a normal year (again according to the ONS - click here).

For contrast, as per the Johns Hopkins Covid19 tracker (click here), in the world as a whole around 90,000 cases have been recorded so far.  Of these around 80,000 cases of and 3,000 deaths were recorded in China, the worst affected country so far, and of these around 67,000 and 2,900 respectively occurred in Hubei, a province which has a population about 90% of the size of the UK's.  So if we are affected as badly as by far the worst affected province in China has (officially) been, we could expect about 75,000 cases of infection and maybe 3,200 deaths -  a very long way below 530,000.

Furthermore, not only the total number of cases, but also the cases per day projected by the UK government are off the scale compared to anything the world has yet seen.  Apparently, the government expects the period from the start of widespread community transmission until the peak of epidemic to be 2 to 3 months, the peak to last 2 or 3 weeks, and the wind down to be another 2 to 3 months - say 6 months or 26 weeks overall.  If there are nearly 53 million infections (80% of 66.4 million) that gives an average of about 2 million infections a week over the whole period - far more than the around 90 thousand cases in the entire world so far.

The UK government may well be unwilling to do anything that would affect the economy adversely - understandably -, and worried that taking preventive action exposes it to the risk of ridicule if  Covid19 just fades away without a major epidemic.  In this it was hardly exceptional, as we can see from Iran's initial response to the crisis, and I doubt the Chinese government was keen on shutting down their economy  Nonetheless, whatever their initial reluctance faced with reality of numerous (>1000) and rapidly increasing cases of this virus, a creaking or totally overwhelmed health care system and - therefore - the prospect of a much higher case fatality rate (maybe 1% to 3.5%) every country  has implemented drastic internal quarantine measures, and I doubt the UK will be an exception.

Update 07/03/2020

The Daily Telegraph reports that the government's plan expects 95% of infections to occur in a three month period. and 50% in three weeks.  This would fit a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15 days.  Without implying that the government's model assumes such a distribution, this would have a daily peak of around 1.25 million cases, of which 10% are likely to require treatment.  Since the UK's medical system struggles with an average winter flu season, which peaks at maybe 1000 cases a week, and since I do not see even the economy-conscious UK government accepting a million avoidable deaths in 6 months (2% of 50 million infections) something is going to have to give, maybe in April.