Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Science

We tend to think of science as providing a single, definitive answer, but that isn’t really how it works. Science is, above all, a method of inquiry, a process of posing questions and rigorously testing these hypotheses. With new and better data, we arrive at new and better conclusions. Scientists still have many important questions about Covid-19, and they will be answered—but over the next few years, not months. There are certain fields of study (climate change, for instance) in which experts have researched the topic for decades, collected mountains of data, published numerous peer-reviewed studies, and arrived at a consensus—though almost always a provisional one that can be revised or even overturned. A strong consensus holds for much of the science we learned in school.

Confirmation bias affects us all

Some critics fume about “low-information voters,” but the problem is not ignorance. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have emphasized the power of “motivated reasoning,” whereby people construct their arguments to arrive at a preferred conclusion. Some studies have found that “high-information voters,” those who read widely and follow news carefully, are in fact more guilty of this kind of partisan thinking. As two political scientists who have studied this phenomenon, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, have argued, the more appropriate term might be “rationalizing voters”—smart people who read the facts and follow the debates, but use their knowledge to justify and support their preexisting biases.

Epistemic crisis

“Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge and how we come to know things; the crisis is that, as a polity, we have become incapable of learning or knowing the same things, and thus, incapable of acting together in a coherent fashion.” Today, listening to experts, reading the news, and getting facts are no longer neutral acts but rather are loaded with political meaning.

The case against subsidising critical manufacturing capability

Is the government supposed to anticipate every imaginable scenario and subsidize dozens of industries to insure against all possible shortages during the next shock?       The supply problem could be solved far more easily if governments simply bought large quantities of a variety of medical supplies and stored them, periodically replenishing those that expired. The shortages are usually short-term, right when the crisis hits—after which the private sector ramps up to fulfill demand. This is exactly what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. For a few months, face masks were running desperately low worldwide, prompting many governments to ban exports of protective equipment. India did so, and over the following months, Indian manufacturers boosted production capacity of N95 masks to 57 times their pre-pandemic level. By July, many places faced massive oversupply. In China, wholesale mask prices fell 90%.

The goal should be to create a kind of strategic medical reserve akin to the strategic petroleum reserve. It'd be much cheaper than keeping entire industries afloat in perpetuity, for the possibility that once in a decade products we need might be in short supply for a few months.

Quarantine

Had Western countries used a carrot rather than a stick—that is, paying Covid-exposed citizens handsomely to quarantine—the total expense would have been a tiny fraction of the cost of lockdowns, with mass relief payments that have now run into the trillions.

Opportunity

The pandemic became an opportunity to focus on what is important in life and let go of some of the extraneous elements.