From your Twitter, it appears that you think a lot about covid-19. So why is the UK response to covid-19 so bad*?
Sometimes my American friends will blame US covid failures on US-specific factors (eg, our FDA, presidential system, Trump). But of course the UK is a (by international standards) culturally similar entity that does not share many of those factors, and still appears to have outcomes at least as bad if not worse. So why?
*I admit this is a bit of a leading question. My stance is something like With the major asterisk of vaccinations, it appears that UK outcomes of covid are quite bad by international standards. Moreover, we can trace certain gov’t actions (eg “eat out to help out”) as clearly bad in a way that was ex ante predictable. But feel free to instead respond “actually you’re wrong and the UK response isn’t so bad due to XYZ contextual factors!” :)
The UK’s outcomes have certainly been bad! Absolutely no argument there.
Before I go into why I think it was, I will say that I suspect there’s quite a lot of randomness in these outcomes, and it’s not straightforward to say it’s because of political responses or whatever.
But that said I think I am pretty comfortable saying that the political response has, in fact, been bad. I think failure to lock down early not once but twice (maybe three times?), the eat out to help out nonsense, the CONTINUED insistence on “washing hands” and so little emphasis on meeting outside, ventilating areas, etc, is really bad and stupid. I think a lot of it stems from bad political leadership (the cabinet mainly chosen for loyalty over brexit rather than talent, a PM who never wants to deliver bad news and always wants to say “I’ve saved Christmas”). And it also probably stems from years of chipping away at state capacity, having a really centralised state with a paradoxically weak centre, etc.
I am, however, quite low-confidence in all this stuff. I think that this set of politicians has been bad, and a randomly selected cabinet from the last 50 years would on average do better, but I don’t know.
From your Twitter, it appears that you think a lot about covid-19. So why is the UK response to covid-19 so bad*?
Sometimes my American friends will blame US covid failures on US-specific factors (eg, our FDA, presidential system, Trump). But of course the UK is a (by international standards) culturally similar entity that does not share many of those factors, and still appears to have outcomes at least as bad if not worse. So why?
*I admit this is a bit of a leading question. My stance is something like With the major asterisk of vaccinations, it appears that UK outcomes of covid are quite bad by international standards. Moreover, we can trace certain gov’t actions (eg “eat out to help out”) as clearly bad in a way that was ex ante predictable. But feel free to instead respond “actually you’re wrong and the UK response isn’t so bad due to XYZ contextual factors!” :)
The UK’s outcomes have certainly been bad! Absolutely no argument there.
Before I go into why I think it was, I will say that I suspect there’s quite a lot of randomness in these outcomes, and it’s not straightforward to say it’s because of political responses or whatever.
But that said I think I am pretty comfortable saying that the political response has, in fact, been bad. I think failure to lock down early not once but twice (maybe three times?), the eat out to help out nonsense, the CONTINUED insistence on “washing hands” and so little emphasis on meeting outside, ventilating areas, etc, is really bad and stupid. I think a lot of it stems from bad political leadership (the cabinet mainly chosen for loyalty over brexit rather than talent, a PM who never wants to deliver bad news and always wants to say “I’ve saved Christmas”). And it also probably stems from years of chipping away at state capacity, having a really centralised state with a paradoxically weak centre, etc.
I am, however, quite low-confidence in all this stuff. I think that this set of politicians has been bad, and a randomly selected cabinet from the last 50 years would on average do better, but I don’t know.