You can't blame bad leaders for everything. By Matthew Yglesias.

You can't blame bad leaders for everything. By Matthew Yglesias. 

The public is troublingly tolerant of bad Covid response

Matthew Yglesias

15 min ago

January 25, 2021. 

Hey folks. The impressive pace of mRNA vaccine development helped spark a December burst of what Noah Smith called “techno-optimism” in a post where he grouped me in with the techno-optimists.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I agree and disagree with in that characterization. And I guess the sentiment I would affiliate myself with is more what I might call tech-positivity than techno-optimism. By that I mean not an affinity for America’s existing big high-tech companies, which I think are a mixed bag, but a belief that technological progress is good and important and should be embraced and encouraged.

The reason I’m not sure I would call myself a techno-optimist is that I don’t think tech-positivity is very widely shared, and I think it’s a huge open question as to whether transformative technologies will actually be used in the future.

One way to explain my view is in terms of two different books Tyler Cowen wrote during the Obama years. One, The Great Stagnation, was politically important and influential because it helped convince right-wing people that the post-1975 slowdown in income growth was a real and significant problem, something they spent most of the previous twenty years denying. But its specific thesis about why that was — a slowdown in the rate of technological progress — seemed a little under proven unless taken as a tautology.* A few years later he published The Complacent Class, which has not been as influential but which I think better diagnoses the problem: the public itself is too small-c conservative and averse to change, so we get stagnation because that’s what people want.

Conor Friedersdorf said over the weekend that the sluggish vaccine rollout was “the biggest failure of American institutions in [his] lifetime.” That’s overstated and got some pushback. But I follow an ideologically diverse group of smart people, and something they all have in common is significant frustration with the overall quality of the Covid response in both the United States and Europe, up to and including the vaccine distribution.

Conor Friedersdorf 

@conor64

The slow pace of vaccinations is the biggest failure of American institutions in my lifetime. Bigger than the Iraq War, bigger than 9/11. The deaths pile up daily and I see nothing close to adequate urgency among federal, state, or local leaders.

January 24th 2021

130 Retweets621 Likes

But something that I think is a little underrated in pan-ideological Frustrated About The Virus Response circles is the extent to which the mass public doesn’t agree with us. The US seems to be doing better than Europe at vaccinations but worse at non-pharmaceutical interventions. But neither has done particularly well at either. And critically, none of the relevant electorates seem particularly upset about it. Aversion to change is triumphing over technological progress.

Voters are okay with wasting vaccine doses

As an example, here’s a Slow Boring World Exclusive poll result that shook me when I first saw it.

Data for Progress asked people if we should put ourselves in the situation of needing to throw out expired vaccine doses if that’s what it takes to ensure that there’s no line-cutting, and there is strong support for wasting doses across parties and among both working-class and college-educated voters.

Trying to talk me off the ledge, Ethan Winter from DfP cautions, “Attitudes may also shift as the Biden administration takes charge and vaccination programs proceed more quickly and, hopefully, with more transparency — building trust in the process.”

I certainly hope so! Still, the fact remains that a lot of people I read seem to have a vision of fussbudget bureaucrats standing in the way of simple common sense on this topic. But that’s not the case.

And while I wouldn’t read too much into a single poll asking an unfamiliar question, there’s a pretty broad pattern in both the United States and Europe where voters seem pretty happy with the way things are going.

There’s little evidence of Covid backlash

A lot of liberals spent 2020 experiencing emotional whiplash as they were first appalled that the Covid death toll didn’t generate a total collapse in GOP political standing, then encouraged by polling that indicated maybe it did, then depressed by the election results which suggested the polls were 3-4 points off the whole time.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths on his watch just didn’t hurt Trump that much.

But consider France, which has done a bit better than the United States in avoiding deaths and quite a bit worse in terms of its economy and vaccine distribution. Emmanuel Macron is not popular (French presidents never are), but he’s never fully given up his spring “rally-round-the-flag” Covid bump.

New York State has had the highest death toll of any US state; people have labored under fairly strict restrictions, and the early vaccine rollout there had some high profile snafus. But a January 19 poll said that “two-thirds of those polled say they approve of the way Cuomo is handling the pandemic,” including 41 percent of Republicans. New York is a rare state that lacks term limits, and 48 percent say they’re ready to back him for an extraordinary fourth term. This percentage is roughly the same as it was during his second term on the potential support for his third. Twenty-eight percent of New York Democrats say they’d like to see another governor, which is a healthy number, but not enough to beat him in a primary, and unless Republicans can pull a really strong candidate out of their hat, they’ll get crushed in a very blue state.

An effective-for-Europe response like Germany’s has generated a big, sustained improvement for Angela Merkel’s CDU.

And this is the general trend throughout Europe: incumbents are not suffering because of Covid. Here’s Spain.

Recall that the financial crisis and ensuing austerity really shattered the Spanish political system, leading to the rise of three new parties (Podemos, Vox, and Ciudadanos). But the new fragmented party system has been hardly impacted by the virus in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world.

In Italy, polling has shifted, but what’s happened is the populist right party Lega is losing ground to Silvio Berlusconi’s old populist right party while the incumbent governing coalition holds steady.

American college-educated professionals can end up a little confused about this, because most of them (us) are outraged about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. But if we are honest, we will admit that we were outraged by Trump’s conduct during the 2016 campaign, outraged by the Access Hollywood tape, outraged by the Muslim Ban, outraged by ACA repeal, outraged by his regressive tax cuts, outraged by his climate denialism, and generally in a constant state of high-pitched outrage about Trump since long before Covid.

Leaders all around the world have different baseline levels of popularity. Macron’s was low; Cuomo’s was high; Trump’s was in the middle. But what we see everywhere is that approval bumps are more common than approval declines, and nobody has collapsed in the face of this.

What people protest for

AstraZeneca and Oxford University made a vaccine that, as best I can tell, virtually all scientists believe based on the available evidence is safe and effective against Covid-19.

But if you live in the United States of America, you’re not allowed to take it. That’s because AstraZeneca kinda botched their Phase 3 trial, and the data isn’t considered sufficiently high-quality for the FDA to issue an Emergency Use Authorization. From the FDA’s point of view, holding off on approval is particularly wise because we already have two very good mRNA vaccines in use, and it’s widely believed that a third vaccine from Johnson & Johnson will be approved soon anyway; plus, AstraZeneca has another trial underway that should avoid the problems and get them approval sooner or later.

Still, I want to emphasize that while most (though not all) scientists I’ve spoken to support the FDA view of this, none of them are expressing to me serious doubts that the vaccine will in fact be approved.

And if you go back to October/November coverage of the mRNA vaccines, you’ll see the same thing — scientists were talking about when the vaccines would be approved based on completion of the process, not experiencing serious doubts as to whether they would be approved. It turns out to be quite rare for a vaccine candidate to make it to a Phase 3 trial and then turn out not to work. The point of the process is to set a very high evidentiary bar for vaccine approvals — a bar that one might think should be lowered given the particular circumstances of the current pandemic.

What’s striking to me, however, is that not only hasn’t the AstraZeneca vaccine been approved for use even on a special “right to try” basis, but that there is absolutely no movement in favor of such approval. And that’s not because Americans lack the know-how or will to protest things. Just during the past twelve months, we’ve seen big stop-the-steal rallies, huge anti-racism protests, and several rounds of protests against non-pharmaceutical interventions. The takeaway from the anti-lockdown protests was that Americans are too individualistic to abide by prolonged business closures. The takeaway from all three rounds of protests is that Americans of diverse ideological backgrounds have profound mistrust of America’s governing institutions. This is a country so taken with the spirit of liberty that we can’t get people to endure the relatively minor inconvenience of wearing a mask while out and about.

The minority of libertarians who aren’t deeply invested in being Covid denialists would like you to believe that the fussbudget FDA is standing between you and the AstraZeneca vaccine. But it’s clear that the American people are absolutely not prepared to let public health experts tell them what they can and can’t do. If people were clamoring for faster approvals, we’d get them. But there’s no Covid Era version of ActUp demanding access. If public health bureaucracies ask people to change, a large share of the population declines to do it. If they try to force people to change, you get significant resistance. But if they block change, then the public is fine with that.

It’s the complacent class.

Technology is not enough

I’ll stop talking about vaccine approvals now since I’m not knowledgeable enough to discuss the details. I just want to make the point that if you look at public resistance to masks and other NPIs, it’s clear that public acceptance of the FDA’s view of vaccine approvals is not driven by universal deference to public health experts.

So let’s talk about something else. Eli Dourado wrote a really useful roundup of technologies he considers promising for the 2020s and one of them related to something I actually know a lot about — mass transit in the Washington, DC area:

The Boring Company has a small, near-operational “loop” under construction in Las Vegas. The project will whiz people around the convention center at up to 155 mph. Expansion plans include the Las Vegas Strip, the airport, and eventually connecting to Los Angeles. Another Boring project, currently mired in environmental review, is the DC-Baltimore Loop, which would connect the two cities’ downtowns in 15 minutes. All of Boring’s loops are designed to be compatible with hyperloop requirements, which would eventually enable 600-mph travel between major cities.

Although the full realization of this technology—a nationwide hyperloop network—is unlikely by 2030, even the 150-mph version is worth following. The time and hassle cost of travel is an important input into the gravity model of trade. I expect the DC-Baltimore Loop to significantly increase economic activity between the two cities—especially helping to revitalize Baltimore, as it would become easier to live there and work in DC.

Here’s the thing about connecting DC and Baltimore by rail: the current 30 minute travel time on the Acela is already really short. When you consider that a person still needs to get to and from the train stations in both cities, and the fact that neither Penn Station in Baltimore nor Union Station in DC is really optimally located, the hyperloop’s improvement on total travel time would be pretty small. The other issue is that people don’t actually take the Acela between DC and Baltimore because the fares are too high because the seats are valuable for through-service to Philadelphia and New York.

The real rail connection between DC and Baltimore is the MARC Penn Line and MARC Camden Line commuter rails. These connections, however, could be greatly improved by adopting the German S-Bahn model, best exemplified by the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland connecting Leipzig and Halle, even more so than the better-known ones in Berlin and Munich. For exactly the reasons Dourado offers, upgrading our commuter rail to the S-Bahn standard of frequent, cheap, convenient service could have huge benefits for the region.

What has to happen?

Instead of commuter trains from Maryland stopping at Union Station and taking up valuable track space, they should run through the First Street Tunnel to the L’Enfant Plaza station, then over the Long Bridge to the job centers at the Pentagon and the new Amazon development at Crystal City, and then out to all the Virginia Rail Express stops in the Virginia suburbs (and of course the VRE trains should do the same in reverse).

All the relevant tracks should be electrified so that instead of diesel locomotives we can use electrical multiple units (like you see on any metro or subway system) that can stop and start faster.

All the stations should have high platforms so people can get on and off the trains without the use of stairs — good for accessibility and parents with strollers, but also lets you make the station stops faster.

Eliminate the bulk of the conductors who check tickets and replace them with a much smaller squad of people who do sporadic proof of payment checks and fine you if you haven’t paid.

With operating costs lower, you can cut fares and boost frequency. The trains also move faster, which is nice and helps with frequency.

Last but by no means least, you need an integrated zoned fair system that aligns the S-Bahn model with WMATA and the various Maryland and Virginia transit agencies, so that the amount you pay is based on how far you ride regardless of whether you take the Metro or the S-Bahn or transfer to or from a bus or whatever else.

This is not a “we don’t need a hyperloop; we just need to adopt German best practices for regional rail” take. Faster intercity trains could be very useful in a different context. It’s just to say that for the particularities of the DC-Baltimore area, the S-Bahn model is actually superior because it includes the secondary job centers at Crystal City, L’Enfant Plaza, and BWI Airport, as well as onward connections via WMATA and the Maryland Transit Administration to the DC central business district.

And it’s all done with long-established proven technology! None of which, again, is to dump on Elon Musk’s efforts to develop better technology. It’s just to say that if America isn’t going to use the best technology that exists today, there’s no particular reason to assume that we’ll use hypothetical better technology in the future.

Why are we stuck with bad commuter rail?

Stakeholders in the Greater Washington area have been talking about MARC/VRE through-running forever, and it looks like Ralph Northam has finally gotten the money together to make the upgrades on the Long Bridge over the Potomac River that you need to accomplish this.

I’m glad to see that. But it only makes it more frustrating that we’re not talking about the full suite of improvements that would truly unlock the potential of regional rail for the Baltimore/Washington area. So why don’t we do it? Well, electrifying tracks would cost money. And building higher platforms would cost money. But also you’d need to talk Amtrak into not price-gouging MARC on using the existing electrical infrastructure on the tracks that the Penn Line runs on. And you’d need to work out the bureaucratic turf between MARC and VRE. You’d need to do something about the fact that the infrastructure needs are larger in Virginia than in Maryland but the economic gains are larger in Maryland than in Virginia**, so you have to decide who pays. And of course the unions aren’t going to like the idea of laying off conductors.

All that said, these are hardly insuperable obstacles.

Besides which, it’s not like the train conductors union is such an overwhelming political force in the United States that it’s impossible to imagine a politician picking a fight with them and winning. The issue is simply that the public would need to want improved train service enough for politicians who don't deliver it to pay a meaningful political cost. By the same token, while all these track and platform upgrades would cost money, it’s honestly not that much money in the scheme of things — we’re talking about a swathe of the country that is both high-income and politically liberal and could easily afford it.

The issue on all these fronts isn’t that the political obstacles are so daunting, but simply that they are non-zero. To make it work, you’d need to pick a couple of political fights. You’d also need to deal with annoying stuff like how the Union Station building in DC is owned by the US Department of Transportation, which doesn’t really care about Maryland commuters.

But at the end of the day, if the elected officials of Maryland and northern Virginia were all convinced that the mass public was frustrated with the state of regional rail in the area, they could get this done. They don’t do it because there isn’t really strong evidence of a big desire for change.

Voters are angry — but complacent

Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders tried to psyche his fellow Democrats into taking decisive action on curbing the filibuster and enacting sweeping legislative change by arguing that the public punishes parties that don’t deliver boldness.

Bernie Sanders 

@BernieSanders

In 1994, Democrats in power lost big because they were not bold.  

In 2010, it happened again. 

If we do not take aggressive action NOW to protect working families, it will happen in 2022. 

January 23rd 2021

17,535 Retweets94,040 Likes

Ezra Klein wrote something similar a couple of days earlier quoting Sanders.

To me, though, it’s important to draw a distinction here. Klein and Sanders are right to think that more decisive action to improve the economic situation would have mitigated Democrats’ losses in 2010 just through the basic mechanism of “voters like having money.”

But House Democrats who voted against the Affordable Care Act did something like 5-15 points better than similarly situated members who voted for it. In general, public opinion on issues shifts against the incumbent president’s party. Republicans suffered midterm losses in 1982, 1986, 1990, 2006, and 2018), and I doubt Sanders would say that’s because they were insufficiently right-wing. The most likely explanation is that we see a recurring pattern of overreach and backlash. The public wants to see the government stabilize the economy but generally prefers politicians who avoid big controversial change. Promising to be bipartisan polls really well, then informed people get angry that these promises amount to a promise to not do very much, but that just goes to show that voters like the idea of a politician who’s not doing very much.

After all, look at the best-polling governors in America — are they hard-chargers who fuse ideological zeal with technical competence to drive forward a rapid pace of change that becomes a model for the country? Of course not. They’re moderate Republicans in northeastern states who serve as checks on the excesses of the state legislature but don’t push contentious right-wing ideas. Andrew Cuomo, whose critics keep pointing out that he’s a kind of fake progressive who keeps deliberately trying to sabotage Democratic control of the state legislature, is also well-liked by his constituents, who don’t mind this idea. These are White Guys In Suits who sort of perform governance without actually rocking the boat too much.

And that’s what the voters want.

The people are wrong!

We live in an era where a certain style of populist sentiment has overwhelming clout.

If you tune in to cable news at 8:00 PM, both Tucker Carlson and Chris Hayes will be on their respective channels explaining to you that elites are running the country into the ground and we need to listen to the wise voice of the people. There is nothing less welcome in any venue than to simply state that the people are mistaken about certain important things.

And to be clear, my anti-populist stance on this is not meant to be in tension with my general view that progressive activists should pay more attention to public opinion and Democrats should try harder to make sure they are doing popular things. It’s precisely because I’m not dug in on populist rhetoric that I’m able to say practical politicians need to trim their sails sometimes. There are good policy ideas that are also popular. And it’s really important to focus on those ideas, because lots of other good policy ideas are unpopular and you’ve got to be careful if you want to win.

But ultimately to build a better future, we can’t just implement ideas that are good and popular. We also need ideas that are good but currently unpopular.

And by and large I don’t think it’s possible, viable, or desirable to do those ideas by tricking people or creating anti-democratic political structures. We need, on some level, to persuade more people that specific changes are desirable. And even more than that, we need to persuade more people that the idea of change and progress is desirable and we should be more skeptical of do-nothing leaders and conservative processes and more open to getting things done.

~~ footnotes ~~

* There is a thing in economics called Total Factor Productivity which is essentially the unexplained residual when you try to figure out why productivity has risen. Some of it is you’re using more capital goods. Some of it is your workers are more skilled. And the rest is TFP. Some economists just call Total Factor Productivity “technology” and therefore derive the result that technological progress drives income growth. To me this is basically phlogiston theory and not an explanation of anything at all. Brief example: on any reasonable use of English words, the printing press was an incredibly important technological innovation but it didn’t drive much productivity growth because the book industry just wasn’t a big deal economically.

** Baltimore is much bigger and poorer than any population center served by VRE. The Pentagon/Amazon job cluster in Northern Virginia is really useful to gain access to. And VRE already serves L’Enfant Plaza. So while Virginians would of course gain new ability to commute into Maryland, quantitatively most of the traffic will go the other way.

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