Latest news with #Hippocratic
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
I've Been RIF'd at USAID, but I Still Swear an Oath—to Democracy
When was the last time that you took an oath? It may have been the vows to your partner when you were married. Within those wedding vows, you swore to put your partner before yourself, to care for them in sickness and health, to cherish and place your partner and family before all others. It may have been as a boy or girl scout, to embody the scout law of being trustworthy, loyal, kind, and courteous. Medical practitioners swear to follow the Hippocratic oath, to care for their patients in an ethical manner. For the most patriotic among us, it may have been at their naturalization ceremony, where they renounce any allegiance to another foreign nation and pledge themselves and their loyalty to the United States. The last oath I took was as a federal employee for the United States Agency for International Development, right before Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time as president. All federal employees take the oath of office as part of the onboarding process, and it is the most emotional day you can imagine. Americans of all races, faiths, and creeds, pledging to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to faithfully execute the laws and duties of their office. The vast melting pot of America made manifest and reiterating their commitment to the community and country that enabled their well-being. That act centers and frames the work that federal employees do. The oath is an immensely powerful act. It is a verbalization of your commitment to something larger than yourself. The oath of office has been a guiding principle for me, and for thousands of other government employees, in the past four months. While Trump has continued his relentless assault against the rule of law in his attempt to destroy U.S. institutions and bend the federal government to his will, terminated government employees have been acting as the last line of defense in one final act of public service to the country. (I technically still work at USAID, but with the Trump administration's elimination of the agency, we're counting down the days we have left. A large portion of USAID will be RIF'd, or officially terminated, on July 1, myself included. I'm currently on paternity leave for the birth of our first son. The remainder of staff will continue to draw down actions, do their best to transfer data and functions over to the State Department, and bring the remaining USAID foreign service officers and their families home. For their efforts, they'll be shown the door on September 1.) Elon Musk has left Washington, and DOGE is to some extent out of the headlines. But rest assured, the damage is still being done. That's why terminated employees have been taking and continue to take action, ranging from the April 5 Hands Off rally to the Tuesday Group—an array of terminated government employees who, as the name implies, meet every Tuesday in the Hart Senate Office Building to conduct peaceful sit-ins of Senate offices and communicate the damage that is being done to their respective states through the wholesale destruction of the departments and agencies that they have devoted their lives to. The conversations with the Senate staffers are often shocking. One would anticipate that the Senate is up to speed on what is happening, able to track stats of terminations and dollars cut by DOGE. The reality, unfortunately, is much worse. Instead, our stories of trauma are often the first time that the Senate staffers are made aware of the cancellation of programs and the stoppage of work. DOGE has moved so quickly, refused to report through traditional channels, and in some cases outright lied to the Senate and House during congressional meetings that it may take upward of a year to fully understand the level of damage it has done. The U.S. is shedding expertise and capacity at a rate unseen in our lifetimes. The only thing that DOGE can do is destroy. Any fool can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it. Since the Trump administration began, an estimated one in 10 federal employees have been terminated. The damage that will be done to the American people cannot be overstated. Government employees are the silent workhorses that keep America safe, providing services for the most vulnerable, such as Meals on Wheels and Head Start educational support, and performing more mundane tasks like weather monitoring and tracking E. coli outbreaks. Even as a government employee, I have been woefully unaware of the number of services my colleagues provide to the American people, and it is only by connecting with them at these protests that I've learned the utter havoc that these cuts will wreak. Every former employee I talk to expresses a sense of bafflement and bewilderment at the callousness and carelessness with which these cuts are being performed. They recall their shock and horror as the DOGE bros come in with sledgehammers and cancel education grants, food aid contracts, and other key services; their overriding goal to slash and burn the carefully curated system that has been built over generations, instead of reforming or improving the government. Unfortunately, the actions and protests of terminated government employees can be added to the long list of protests that have galvanized the people but have not had an appreciable impact on policy. In the past 20 years, the U.S. has seen some of the largest protests, the largest social movements in history, and they have had the smallest effects on policy. The generational struggle for equality has continued with immense numbers of Americans marching for racial justice in the Black Lives Matter protests, sharing stories of abuse through the #MeToo movement, and confronting inequality through Occupy Wall Street. We are more acutely aware of the problems that we face, yet we find ourselves unable to rally the political will to implement any solutions. Instead our dysfunction has allowed reactionary forces to erode our rights and empower the worst facets of our id. Trump was elected in 2024 by promising to fix all of the problems that Americans have articulated, and since taking office he has instead poured gasoline on all of our challenges, actively inflaming our wounds and highlighting the broken facets of our government. Most people would be disheartened by this. What can one person do against such reckless hate? This: We must all take and retake our oaths—to verbalize our social contract to each other, to recognize that the Constitution is a parchment barrier and that the power it has comes from the people. Our actions and beliefs give it purpose and tangibility. It is time for solidarity. Not a fantasy solidarity where a magical combination of impeccable motive, purehearted action, and presupposed triumph usher in a progressive victory unmet by opposing forces; where without sweat and equity the vaunted march of history continues forward. We must retake our oath to America with a full understanding of the perils of our age, with a full comprehension of the dangers that our democracy faces, and how close we are to losing it. Taking an oath binds you to an understanding that society demands more than your passive acknowledgment; it requires your active participation. True solidarity does not tolerate the papering over of our differences but grows and strengthens through listening to the experiences of our community, through understanding the internal discomfort of being wrong and having the fortitude to recognize each other's differences. We must all recognize that being a citizen of a healthy democracy requires us to take the oath below; that our office of being an engaged citizen is the highest calling we can achieve. Let us all retake our oath to America, that: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
The Citizen
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Citizen
Comrades demands grit but so does the courtroom
Advocate Charles Mnisi's request to miss court after the Comrades Marathon sparked debate on balancing personal ambition with professional and ethical obligations. Judge Ratha Mokgoatlheng put his foot squarely in it yesterday in the High Court in Pretoria when he went on a tirade about a request from a defence lawyer in the Senzo Meyiwa trial to be excused from court on Monday because he is running the Comrades Marathon on Sunday. After angrily speaking about 'justice delayed is justice denied' in a case in which family members have been waiting for closure for a decade, Mokgoatlheng fumed: 'This is what happens in a South Africa run by blacks. A white advocate will never have the gall to ask me that.' While many took offence at what one of them, Good party's Brett Heron, called 'racially divisive language', which is 'entirely unacceptable', I was more intrigued about the fact that a senior advocate, Charles Mnisi, would have thought that taking part in the annual KZN athletic spectacle was more important that defending an accused in a murder case. I wondered, initially, whether advocates have to swear an oath, similar to the Hippocratic one taken by doctors, to act at all times in the best interests of their clients and the legal system. Then I thought about it a little more. Mnisi was, after all, asking to be excused from attending court on Monday, which would be a recovery day and not race day itself. ALSO READ: 'This is what happens in a SA run by blacks': Senzo Meyiwa trial judge fires off explosive rant He said he was planning to drive back to Johannesburg after the race and, obviously, would not make it in time. Now, as an advocate who presumably gets paid a decent whack for his time, I ask; could he not have afforded to fly back to Gauteng, either late on Sunday night or early on Monday morning? As someone who has five Comrades marathons under my belt (although many years ago now), I do remember the post-race agony. That post-race agony for me, I remember, was made worse by hobbling down the aircraft steps at the then Jan Smuts airport on one occasion. That hobbling – everybody knew what it was caused by – was worn as a badge of honour, though. What an entrance to court it would have made had Mnisi got back in time and hobbled in on Monday morning and asked for the court's indulgence for his gait, by explaining to the judge that he had just travelled 90km on foot from Pietermaritzburg to Durban but that, while his legs may be hurting, his mind was ready for the fight… ALSO READ: Meyiwa trial becomes a courtroom spectacle without justice Completing the Comrades is, for all entrants, a triumph of mind over matter because human bodies are simply not made for that sort of effort. Will power and not muscle power gets you over the finish line. I do realise that many runners put their lives on hold for the first half of any given year in getting ready for the race. I know I did. Job, family, friends all took a back seat to joining the '100 Club' (100 miles, or 160km, in one training week). But I never missed a commitment – or ducked work – because I was a runner. If you can commit yourself to finishing the Annual Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Pain, surely you can suffer a little more discomfort on a recovery day to honour a professional appointment? The Comrades Marathon – the gruelling training, the arduous competition itself and the agony of recovery – is not for sissies. It's a quest you can't walk, or hobble, away from. Pretty much the same as life in general. NOW READ: 'No proper investigation was done': Defence frustrated over missing evidence in Senzo Meyiwa murder trial
Atlantic
20-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Power of a Good Suit
Why the COVID Deniers Won In the March issue, David Frum considered lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath. David Frum asks why so many Americans resisted vaccines, and finds his answer in political strife, misinformation, and irrational responses. But rational mistrust of the health-care system also lay behind that resistance. COVID came on the heels of the opioid crisis. Many people, especially in red states, were suffering from an addiction to a class of medicines once promoted as cutting-edge science. The opioid crisis is but one example of ethical failings in American health care. The essence of the Hippocratic oath—to place patient welfare over every other motive—has been assailed by incentives to both over- and undertreat, costing citizens time, blood, and money. Although I hope, with Frum, that the future belongs to those who help their country, we need to first agree that it is dead wrong for anyone, in any way, to profit from hurting people. Sarah M. Brownsberger Bellingham, Wash. I really appreciate David Frum's writing, but I think this article brushed over valid skepticism of the government in a moment of crisis. The official advice was always presented as an edict. I didn't appreciate being told not to ask questions. Similarly, I understood why some were nervous about receiving rushed vaccines with brand-new mRNA technology. I would love to see both sides of this debate conduct an open postmortem. That would be good for all of us. Mike Bergman Minneapolis, Minn. Thank you to David Frum for his analysis of why the COVID deniers won. But as a physician, I believe Frum missed one of the major reasons denying COVID paid off for Donald Trump. This factor is medical, not social, and if we are to avoid an even bigger disaster during the next pandemic, it's crucial that we understand it. Trump lucked out in part because of the nature of the coronavirus, which was relatively less lethal than other viral species. Most deaths occurred in patients who were old, chronically ill, or suffering from other preexisting conditions. As a result, the pandemic, tragic as it was, lacked the element of horror that might accompany one caused by more inherently lethal viruses. No wonder people ended up sneering at masks and school closures. Right-wing media could spin COVID denial into a sensible response to what they presented as an epidemiological nonevent. Unfortunately, Trump may not be so lucky next time. And a potential killer virus may be lurking just beyond the horizon: avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu. The World Health Organization views this virus with great alarm, because, having slashed through the poultry industry and many dairy herds, it is only a few mutations away from being able to pass from human to human. The death rate for bird flu is about 50 percent. Young people are not spared. Any risks to the U.S. population would be magnified dramatically by President Trump's appointments and policies. The chances of quickly developing a vaccine, should bird flu begin infecting significant numbers of humans, appear small. It's not just the anti-vaxxers who will paralyze us: Our biomedical-research capabilities have been devastated by cuts to the National Institutes of Health's budget. If an avian-influenza pandemic does hit, Trump could pull out the old COVID‑19 playbook. Why not? It worked the last time. But the viral character of the next pandemic could make it difficult for him to evade responsibility for the nightmare that may follow. Brad Stuart, M.D. Forestville, Calif. David Frum replies: In the first weeks after the coronavirus struck, many decisions had to be made quickly based on imperfect information. Unsurprisingly, many of those decisions now look wrong. But the most lethal of all the bad decisions was the effort to discourage conservative-leaning Americans from receiving COVID vaccines. Tens of thousands of people died unnecessarily because they followed advice from leaders they trusted. Lockdowns were too draconian. Masking was mostly useless. Blue-state schools should have reopened faster. But those mistakes all shrink in gravity compared with the malicious effort to disparage vaccination. So, yes, let's criticize the errors of the overzealous. But right now, the people who hold government power in the United States are those with the deadliest record—and no conscience. Behold My Suit! In the March issue, Gary Shteyngart wrote about his quest to end a lifetime of fashion misery. Gary Shteyngart looks indescribably cool and writerly in his new suit! I'd offer to marry Gary based solely on how he looks in that suit, walking those New York streets like he owns them. Boston ladies love a man in a good suit. Ruth Morss Cambridge, Mass. Reading 'Behold My Suit!' was gratifying on many levels. I wholly agree that women should not have all the fun with clothes. Some people dress to impress others, and some people dress to please themselves; perfection is reached when you can do both at once. I envy Shteyngart for hitting the bull's-eye. Not that I would ever dream of claiming greater shoe expertise than Yohei Fukuda—but brown suede shoes with a blue suit? Brown shoes with a dark-blue suit are acceptable, but not preferred. Plus, the world's most elegant suede shoes are still informal. I'd never drop $3,000 on a pair of suede shoes, even if they had diamonds on their soles. And one final tip to the young men out there considering upping their fashion game: You can make even a $10,000 suit irrelevant if you don't bother to get a shave. Austin, Texas The Last Great Yiddish Novel In the April issue, Judith Shulevitz considered how Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters rescues a destroyed world. I translated four of Chaim Grade's books and placed them with U.S. publishers in the 1970s. I had a wonderful personal relationship with Grade, a kind of uncle-nephew bond. I'm proud to have helped put him on the map: When I finished translating Grade's two-volume masterwork, The Yeshiva, I found a home for it with the venerable Bobbs-Merrill, a more famous publisher than those that had issued my earlier translations. It also published my first novel, The Yemenite Girl. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews read Grade's work, including Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the worldwide Chabad organization. Grade told me that Schneerson once called him to ask how he was feeling, somehow sensing that he was ill. 'Rebbe, how did you know I was not well?' Grade asked. 'Because for two weeks I did not see your weekly chapter of The Yeshiva in the Morgn-Journal,' the Rebbe answered. 'So I thought something must be the matter.' The Morgn-Journal was a Yiddish daily to which Grade contributed fiction. Shulevitz is right to note that, aside from his Holocaust memoir, The Seven Little Lanes, Grade did not mention the Holocaust in his work. But if you read carefully the last page of The Yeshiva, where the two protagonists stand on a platform full of people awaiting the arrival of a train, one cannot help but feel in Grade's elegiac tone a recognition that other trains will soon be coming. Behind the Cover In this month's cover story, ' Donald Trump Is Enjoying This,' Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer offer a definitive account of the president's political comeback. They discussed with Trump how he is using his power, and drawing on the lessons of his first term, to run the country (and, in his words, 'the world'). For our cover image, the illustrator Dale Stephanos rendered in pencil a photograph of Trump taken in North Las Vegas last fall. — Paul Spella, Senior Art Director Corrections 'Growing Up Murdoch' (April) originally stated that a line in King Lear was directed at Cordelia. In fact, it was directed at Goneril. 'Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped' (April) misstated the number of nights Karen Read has spent in jail. She has spent two nights in jail, not one. 'The Cranky Visionary' (April) originally stated that the Barnes Foundation was effectively America's first museum of modern art. In fact, it was among the first.
New York Post
30-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
New York inches closer to legal-suicide madness — gov, you gotta stop it!
Albany's progressives have taken one step closer to utterly surrendering what little remains of their moral center: The Assembly, as threatened by Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx), passed a monstrous bill legalizing assisted suicide. As it stands, the bill is restricted to mentally competent adults with a terminal diagnosis and six months or less to live, allowing them to ask for and be prescribed drugs that will kill them. Proponents sell such bills with pablum, such as: Who are we to interfere with anyone's choices? And it's the compassionate thing to do! Never mind that suicide just isn't that hard to do, that no one needs an MD's help to do it, nor that such laws inevitably pressure doctors to ignore their own ethics, including the Hippocratic oath. But the biggest lie of all is: It's limited in scope to those already dying. Why do you even care? Because the suicide enthusiasts inevitably move on from these laws to campaigning to extend 'voluntary' euthanasia to others. Like Zoraya ter Beek, a physically healthy young woman in the Netherlands, who was allowed to kill herself because of depression. Sometimes, the enthusiasm of the state to 'assist' people into suicide takes on fiscal-savings overtones, as with the case of Canadian paralympian Christine Gauthier: The government tried to get her to kill herself after she asked for a wheelchair ramp to be installed at her house. In America, advocates have gotten bills into various state legislatures meant to expand the range of people allowed to prescribe the deadly drugs (in the case of Vermont, they want some non-doctors to be able to do it). Happily, the New York bill saw significant Dem breakaway during Assembly passage, with around 20 crossing the aisle to vote 'nay,' including Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes (D-Erie). And Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousin is being coy about the bill's prospects in her house. Gov. Hochul, your path is clear. If the bill reaches your desk, veto it; there's plenty of opposition even within your own party. Don't let another exercise in faux compassion devalue human life in the Empire State even more.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Wrong Kind of Abundance
'I am … inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of Hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.' F. A. Hayek, 1974 Nobel Prize lecture Forgive me for how precious-sounding this is, but: If you really want to understand COVID politics in the United States, you have to unwind American political history all the way back to 1776—and a bit before, getting to know that character who shouldn't exist but somehow does: the conservative revolutionary. COVID unleashed a lot of different kinds of crazy in the United States, and, on the right, it broke the dam for a special kind of crazy, the kind that leads to the embrace of crackpots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a 'progressive conservative'; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a 'radical conservative' and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower. Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply. In the past few decades, we have seen a collection of episodes—9/11 and its global aftermath, the 2008 financial crisis and the Tea Party movement that grew out of it, the COVID controversies, January 6—that could be understood either as a series of progressively radicalizing events for the Right or, conversely, as an endless and repetitious acting out of that great American contradiction, politically of a piece with everything from the Jacksonian opposition to the central bank to southern secession to George Wallace and enraged populist opposition to the Civil Rights Movement (the right should not in this sense be thought of as synonymous with the Republican Party) to the Ross Perot phenomenon in the 1990s to the rise of Donald Trump. As an identifiable and discrete political phenomenon, the American conservative movement might locate its beginning to the publication of Buckley's God and Man at Yale, a populist attack on the Ivy League written by a moneyed aristocrat from Connecticut, young and Yale-educated and not at all uninterested in making a name for himself. Buckley in the volume heaped scorn on elite institutions, argued that those at the top of such institutions were abusing their positions for self-interested reasons, rejected 'the superstitions of 'academic freedom'' as his subtitle had it, and was deeply skeptical of claims of expertise when those claims came from quarters unaligned with his values and interests: From the beginning, the right was ready for COVID. And so was the left, in its way, and the journalist David Zweig documents that in his new book, An Abundance of Caution. While the right descended from the realms of propriety—mainline Protestantism, the Chamber of Commerce, the country clubs—into 1968-style paranoia and nihilism, progressives passed them on the opposite side of the road, having completed that 'long march through the institutions' and installed progressive allies at the commanding heights of culture, media, business, education—power. The left's irreconcilable contradiction, which you can see personified in the vicious young Hamas champions at Columbia University, comes from the marriage of adversarial protest culture to the facts of life at the top of the org chart: When Ivy League students denounce Ivy League administrators, that is a left-on-left struggle session, with conservatives on the sidelines. But the Trump administration's bungled response to COVID gave progressives a way to keep all of those feet, in Birkenstocks and in sensible managers' brogues, marching in the same direction: The hysterical progressive overreaction to COVID served the left's vestigial need to denounce and to protest, while also serving the progressive desire to submit themselves to the management of empowered experts and to require the submission of others to that expert management. 'Liberals, who had long been disgusted by the president, now found their disgust metastasized into fear- and indignation-driven rage,' Zweig writes. 'A new, contagious virus was circulating in the country and the guy in charge, a paragon of wishful thinking and unseriousness, was going to cause unnecessary mayhem and harm and deaths. As in any classic story, an antipode to the villain was needed.' He identifies that heroic as being filled initially by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, 'projecting a paternalistic, calming authority,' but the hero ended up being a collective one: paternalistic, calming authority itself, along with all of its most telegenic vessels and sources. Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers. Those problems include: overreliance on mathematical models that can be tweaked for ideological ends where empirical observation and measurement provide insufficient support for the preferred policy—or would militate against it if taken into account; the fetishization of technology in education, very nicely illustrated by Bill Clinton, ensorcelled by the apparent early promise of the classroom internet, repeating almost verbatim identical claims that had been made about radio in its infancy—and that were made about film and television as well; the moronizing effects of reflexive political tribalism—there was a time when the Trump campaign could complain, with some reason, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were working to 'undermine the public's confidence in the coming coronavirus vaccine,' ironic as that complaint is to read today with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Cabinet; the related self-censorship of the media in the service of narrow partisan interests and dogmatic progressivism; and misalignment of incentives, with policymakers (disproportionately progressive-leaning) captured by special interests (notably Randi Weingarten and the teachers' unions) and thence producing policy agendas that did not serve the public interest, a situation that would be familiar enough to anybody who had ever read a few pages of F. A. Hayek or James Buchanan. (I mean the public-choice economist, not the 15th president.) About that final point: Reading An Abundance of Caution is a little bit like reading Ezra Klein in the past few years, as ladies and gentlemen of the sort who write for the New Yorker seem to discover phenomena that have been at the center of the liberal-libertarian critique of progressivism for a century or so. When it comes to housing supply, for example, Klein and Matt Yglesias have even discovered that regulation has unintended consequences! You won't find Hayek's essays or The Calculus of Consent in Zweig's index, and, what's worse, you won't find very much evidence that the author has read such works—which he should have, given the light a century's accumulation of economic and political literature might have shed on his subject. (Also: He's very soft on progressive education reformer John Dewey, so he's lucky I'm reviewing the book and not Jonah Goldberg, who reacts strongly to the name.) The 2020s have been, for libertarians, a time of watching the unseemly spectacle of our friends on the left learning the most elementary things in public and the somewhat sorrier spectacle of our friends on the right forgetting what little they had learned, or had pretended to learn, about the epistemic problems of central planning and—most directly relevant to Zweig's work—'the pretense of knowledge,' as Hayek famously put it. Because it is, of course, the pretense of knowledge that Zweig really is writing about, particularly when it comes to such considerations as mathematical modeling. As Hayek remarked in his Nobel Prize lecture, economists and other social scientists suffer from envy of the physical sciences. They attempt to imitate the methods of the physical sciences, but there is a problem with their doing so: Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes. It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant. And, of course, the ladies and gentlemen managing the COVID response would have done well to consider Hayek's great maxim: 'The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.' Which might help the author understand how, for example, Imperial College London's influential epidemic model, produced by Prof. Neil Ferguson, loomed so large while being so thin: Ferguson's model assumed that 37 percent of transmission occurs in schools and workplaces, with schools having twice the transmission rate as workplaces. These figures are very important—they are the basis of the model, and the foundation of its projections about the effect of school closures. So, where did Ferguson get these figures? The answer is not in the main paper. To find the source of the figure one has to spelunk deep into the paper's supplement, where you would discover the following text: 'It is necessary to make assumptions about the proportion of transmission which occurs in schools and workplaces, as data do not exist. … Our assumption is that 37% of transmission occurs in these contexts, with the within-school transmission coefficient being twice that of the within-workplace coefficient. However, this choice is arbitrary.' If you need to take a moment to let the previous sentences sink in, I understand. When I first found this passage I felt like a cartoon character rubbing his eyes at seeing a mirage. I had to read it three times before I believed it was real. Many of our progressive friends have figured out that the 'expertise' put into force during the pandemic was in fact fallible. But when it comes to federally directed green-energy boondoggles or Washington-based management of the housing market—or similar intrusions in education, or health care, or much else—they do not seem quite prepared to apply the lessons they have learned more generally. Mathematical modeling led the public health authorities and self-interested politicians to support suboptimal and, at times, even idiotic COVID mitigation policies. But that is hardly the end of the story. Consider the prominence of mathematical modeling in the climate debate. There are real questions (far beyond my competence to work through) about climate models themselves, but climate policy involves modeling more than the climate itself. For example, many claims about reduced energy use in supposedly 'green' buildings are based on mathematical models that have no direct observable relationship to the real-world energy use in those buildings. Models of 'embodied carbon' in building materials (and other consumer goods) are by nature arbitrary and incomplete, and reliably fail to take account of second-order market effects. (E.g.: Preventing U.S.-based power plants from burning coal could easily turn out to be bad for greenhouse-gas emissions globally, because lower demand from relatively clean U.S. plants reduces price pressure on coal, encouraging consumption by operators of relatively dirty plants in China, India, etc.) And a great deal of our economic policy debate (as about minimum-wage laws) is shaped by mathematical modeling that cannot be empirically evaluated, because doing so would require a comparison between measurable outcomes and non-measurable counterfactuals. I write this not because I'm interested in side cases, but because I believe the overall context—the habits of American thinking about public affairs—is necessary for understanding what went wrong with COVID and why it is likely, if not inevitable, that we will repeat the mistakes every time we are faced with a similar episode of social stress. Zweig writes: 'One thing is clear: the school closures and broader harms unnecessarily and unfairly inflicted upon America's children were overdetermined.' An overdetermined effect is one that has more than one cause. The COVID mess is largely behind us—but the mess behind the mess, the ur-mess, remains. Those overdetermining factors are likely to create similar pathways to error in very different kinds of policy contexts. The book is published by the MIT Press, a major academic publisher, so it is of course incompetently edited, and the prose is dreadful in places—i.e., about average for a book of this type in our time. (Cuomo 'wore a dark navy suit with a crimson tie and crisp white shirt. He sat erect. His tie had a perfect knot, and hung perfectly centered. The lines of his jacket's lapels formed a tight V down his torso and angled at the top to shoulder pads that jutted stiffly outward like the wing serifs in the Van Halen logo.' Ye gods.) The subtitle is American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, and while there were a lot of destructive and costly policies imposed in response to COVID, this book is, as advertised, almost exclusively about school closures. The author is a father and plainly was annoyed—and pained, and worried—by what his own children went through. The damage done will probably last a long time, if not a lifetime, for children whose lives were disrupted by an extraordinary degree of isolation and inactivity during the COVID shutdowns, and it is natural that the situation of children should rise to the top of our concerns. But other changes—including the further aggrandizement of federal executive power, the precedent of extraordinary economic interventions, massive government spending and a large increase in public debt, inflation, etc.—may in the end prove more destructive. And all of those factors will interact in complex ways with the radicalization of the right noted in the opening section of this review. From time to time, I will speak to someone who has undergone a midlife political transformation and ask him about what happened to make that come to pass. I am surprised by how many times I have heard conservative men say that they were radicalized—some even use the word radicalized—by the Brett Kavanaugh affair, in which Democrats attempted to personally ruin a Supreme Court nominee by means of bizarre and outlandish claims of sexual misdeeds he supposedly engaged in, some of them as a minor, depravities that were almost certainly wholly invented and unquestionably invented in part. It was a gross and contemptible affair, but if you have made it to 40 or 50 and have been paying attention to American politics, even casually, you've seen a lot of that sort of thing. Some people are just walking around in the world—or scrolling through Facebook—looking for a reason to get radicalized. They already have attained the necessary emotional state, and what remains is to fixate on a defensible pretext. But 9/11 wasn't like that. The financial crisis wasn't like that. January 6 wasn't like that. And COVID wasn't like that, either, though it is easy to get carried away with criticisms that are generally well-founded. At one point in his book, Zweig marvels and despairs that certain public health authorities are staffed disproportionately by people who describe themselves as risk-averse, as though this disproportionality were somehow self-evidently a problem in and of itself. I have written a good deal about variation in personal and group risk aversion as a factor in our public life, and I believe it is an underappreciated motive factor in our politics. But it will not do to treat attitudes toward risk at variance with one's own as obviously mistaken—or, really, even as mistaken at all: People are allowed to decide for themselves how they feel about risk, whether the subject is a potentially (if rarely) dangerous infectious disease such as COVID or investing in securities when saving for retirement or taking out a variable-rate mortgage. Better public policies would allow more people to organize their lives in ways that reflect their own risk tolerance—except for the niggling fact that this also requires a community with the discipline to allow those who would enjoy the rewards of high risk tolerance to also bear its costs, which we Americans have been patently unwilling to do for a generation. People who find it difficult to be libertarians when it comes to the health insurance market are unlikely to take a libertarian approach to an epidemic. The results of the 2024 election very strongly suggest that Americans want to be micromanaged, that they desire to have an all-powerful leader who will tell them from whom they may buy a pair of flip-flops and whose flip-flops are verboten, or at least taxed to bits. Mass democracy is a petri dish, and what grows in it is stupidity, a virus far more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2. We have the means to contain it—and to let democracy play its natural and necessary role as part of a healthy political ecosystem—but we are facing an epidemic, and our defenses are being overrun.
