What happens when a slow-moving object enters a fast-moving environment?
Re governments and pandemics
For the past two and a half years, we have collectively had the opportunity to witness the societal equivalent of putting an ice cube into a pot of boiling water. The results have been…well, rather mixed.
The covid pandemic was a fast-moving situation - it surfaced to public view in China at the end of December 2019, and by March 2020 it affected the entire world. There are lots of movies that capture this “zero to 100” dynamic - Contagion, World War Z, Zombieland, 2012, Don’t Look Up - all of which explore the dysfunction of governments that sudden, unexpected catastrophe brings.
Governments are designed to deal very well with long-standing, comprehensive, and slow-moving phenomena. It seems reasonable to state that no world government was prepared for covid - the Johns Hopkins Event 201 scenario and Rockefeller Foundation planning sessions notwithstanding.
We can see indications of this lack of preparation in the vacillation around masks, for example, by Dr. Anthony Fauci - who went from saying they weren’t necessary outside of healthcare in March 2020, to saying they were necessary everywhere by summer 2020, to wearing one underneath his nose that same summer. Apart from mixed messages - not a great idea during a pandemic if The Science is truly settled , it is clear that even he did not know whether masks were useful or not.
Three proposals: 1) governments need to become more nimble; (2) we need to expect less of governments when sudden changes to the environment occur - both over- and under-reaction are probable; (3) the “clean-up phase” will take longer than the crisis itself.
As long as governments' response to a mistake is to dig in and double down rather than to reverse course, we need them to be much less nimble, not more.
If governments had come up with no policy response to covid whatsoever for the first 2.5 years and simply ignored it instead, we would be vastly better off today.
With government responses, less is often more. The Swedish government trusted the Swedish people and that worked out quite a bit better than the aggressive, often violent, grindingly sanctimonious paternalism in North America.