The COVID story is ideal political cover, regardless of the truth, which never mattered — Cameron Murray

What are your thoughts? Just remember, the truth doesn’t matter. All major institutions will have to conform to the narrative that gets written by the powerful. As I have said before, no one in power will ever want a cost-benefit analysis of their policy choices—what is the incentive to prove yourself an idiot to the world? If anything, there will be some reports written that have obviously implausible counterfactuals and these will become the standard reference point for the official writing of the history of 2020. The story and the fear will live on through these. It will be decades before the true lessons are learnt. Such is the power of the story.…

What are  my thoughts. First, I think that the author is a first-rate economist based on past posts. Secondly, he is wandering from his field here. Thirdly, it's more complicated than he makes out.

While there is truth to narrative control as a causal factor socially, that control has been loosened by the Internet and especially the proliferation of social media. So the narrative is no longer monolithic, which blunts his major premise.

In addition, the "narrative control" syndrome has become a conspiracy theory. While there are elite factions that exert powerful influence on the narrative through the media, these factions are not always aligned because their interests are not completely congruent. So always look for the winners and losers and "follow the money and power."

Moreover, the factors involved are more complex than just the narrative. There are real factors, too, like the availability of real resources that can be brought to bear at scale. For example, the weak link in the chain of addressing the pandemic is medical resources, including plant, personnel, equipment and pharma. While this is not evenly distributed, it is widely enough felt to be an issue. A good deal of the dynamic is driven by the condition of the medical system.

There are other factors influencing the narrative, too. Fear sells and the corporate media is an industry. The incentive is to maintain and increase market share and this means providing customers with what they want to buy. It is well known in marketing and advertising that FEGG sells. FEGG = fear, exclusivity, guilt and greed. These are chief motivators in the consumer society. 

Even without lockdowns, commerce has been affected negatively by people avoiding risk. While this is benefitting ecommerce, it is hurting other firms. Winners and losers.

Cameron Murray mentions another point that probably is not widely recognized when he writes, "It will be decades before the true lessons are learnt." I was discussing this recently with my physician, a med school professor. She was saying that not enough is known yet about this disease and so they are have to guess about many things that won't become clear until longer term studies are in. Some guesses turn out right and others wrong. The wrong ones reduce public confidence when they see policy changed.

The way I see it, the health care system is similar to the economic system. We understand how to manage both when the trend is stable, but not so much when the trend is unstable. A pandemic is to health care as a depression is to economics, and in fact, they can go hand in hand as a pandemic takes its toll on an economy. If it were not for fiscal liberalization, the US would be in much more economic difficulty, for instance.

In conclusion, as usual I think that all social major issues have to be addressed at the systemic level. The temptation is to get overly analytic and ignore relevant factors. I think that Cameron Murray puts his finger on an important factor but I also think that he does so at the expense of a more systematic approach. 

For one thing, it is not the narrative that is the most prominent causal factor. It is the nature of the global pandemic as a complex social phenomenon requiring adaptation to changing conditions for survival. And being in the throes of it, we have not yet even started to figure it out. There are just too many issues in dispute, for instance.

Fresh Economic Thinking
The COVID story is ideal political cover, regardless of the truth, which never mattered

Cameron Murray | Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Henry Halloran Trust at The University of Sydney

See also

Bill Totten's Weblog
COVID-19: Politicisation, “corruption”, and suppression of science
Kamran Abbasi, Executive editor
British Medical Journal (November 13 2020)
BMJ 2020; 371 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4425 (Published )
Cite this as: BMJ 2020;371:m4425

Kamran Abbasi is a physician, visiting professor at the Department of Primary Care and Public Health, Imperial College, London, executive editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM), journalist, cricket writer and broadcaster, who contributed to the expansion of international editions of the BMJ and has argued that medicine cannot exist in a political void. — Wikipedia

See also

Policymakers have faced a crucial trade-off between curbing the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic and minimising further damage to economic activity. Employing reduced form econometric estimates of the Covid-19 pandemic, this column seeks to quantify the impact of government interventions on disease progression and mobility. It finds that a wide-ranging package of public health policies – including comprehensive testing, tracing and isolation, mask-wearing, and policies directed at vulnerable people in care homes – are crucial to avoid full lockdowns while also containing the spread of the virus. Such policies may, however, need to be complemented by selective containment measures such as restricting large public events and international travel or localised lockdowns....

vox.eu

Epidemiological and economic consequences of government responses to COVID-19

Balázs Égert, Yvan Guillemette, Fabrice Murtin, David Turner 

02 January 2021