An elderly man at a pub, the day after Boris Johnson advised avoiding public spaces. Credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty images
Why won’t people stay at home? Why did the Government have to order the pubs to close to stop people huddling together in the sweaty bundles of humanity that Covid-19 loves so much?
When and if the coronavirus crisis is contained, there will be many reckonings and re-evaluations, not least about the relationship between the state, individuals and markets. In this, Boris Johnson’s decision to order pubs, clubs and restaurants to close — and the seemingly inevitable follow-up, lockdown — will be significant.
It is well-known that the Prime Minister is inclined to want to keep the state out of mundane personal business. He also likes to court people who like to go out for a drink, hence his regular schtick about free-born Britons’ ancient right to a pint of beer. His reluctance to see the state telling people what to do was abundantly clear in his Mother’s Day press conference, when he spoke breezily about the joys of being out and about on a fine sunny day.
But Johnson’s worldview is a topic for someone else. What interests me is other people. What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?
And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?
I am not a libertarian, but I think libertarianism deserves some acknowledgement for its optimism about human nature. In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.
Here’s David Boaz of the Cato Institute in The Libertarian Mind:
“The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.”
Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.
This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).
Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.
Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.
How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?
If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.
Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.
The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.
How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.
The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?
Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.
When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’.
Maybe this time really will be different. Maybe this time, when the dust settles on the graves of the last Covid-19 victims, we can start a serious conversation about how and why human beings really do what we do. And about the role of the state in markets that are made up of frail, human people who we cannot expect — or require — to be either nice or rational.
I am no fan of narrow, classical, rational agent economics, but I do admire the optimistic view of humanity that underpins the libertarianism that is its intellectual cousin. I like to think that with a bit of help, most people will mostly make the right choices. But the refusal of many people to do the sensible and altruistic thing over coronavirus leaves me gloomily wondering about that.
If people cannot be trusted to make decisions that can make the difference between life and death, if they and others must be protected from the exercise of their free will in something so fundamental, where else should restraint be imposed by the state, for the good of the individual and society? Put it another way: once you’ve closed pubs and banned people from going outside, imposing, say, a tax to deter people from consuming sugary drinks is going to seem like a very small thing indeed.
This, not the size of the state or the tax burden, will be the real change the virus brings to countries founded on liberal ideas of human nature.
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SubscribeIt’s interesting that you mention availability bias. The media is daily bombarding us with news and stories about coronavirus which is a prime case of availability bias. Every year we go about our lives normally and don’t see the 10,000-30,000 people who die of flu in the UK. The government doesn’t announce even limited social distancing measures each flu season to protect the vulnerable.
If the government is prepared to deliberately tank the economy and then bail it out to the tune of several hundred billion then why can’t they spend a few billion more each year on social care and the NHS to improve the nation’s health?
Only the future will show what the human costs of panic over coronavirus were, and whether the cure was better or worse than the disease.
I suspect most of the people who are not following the State’s demands realize the SARS COVID-19 virus is the same virus that gives us colds. In time, everyone will go back to their lives and the virus will continue spreading throughout the world’s population. The virus is here to stay. We might as well accept the inevitable outcomes. Of course, we should all help protect the very young, the very old and the infirm. Most likely, this time next year when the media attention has faded, most people will carry on as if nothing happened.
Yep, just like we accept thousands of deaths from flu every year without any social distancing rules.
Too many of the same old writers popping up on a site that is surely supposed to give a voice to the ‘UnHerd’. That aside, the H1N1 virus of 2010 killed at least 12,500 people in the US and the world did not come to a stop. The whole thing is madness. And no, the only thing that will kill off libertarianism is surrender to China, a country whose threat is equivalent to 20 Nazi Germanys.
The possibility not mentioned is that the concern over the pandemic is overblown and hysterical, while the people who go to a pub to enjoy a pint are the rational ones.
Very few people were going out to start with last week. Hardly anyone is ignoring the health advice. The media is frantically trying to create a sensation rather than looking at things in perspective. Cool heads are needed, not condemnation.
With libertarianism the idea is not that the choices people are free to make will somehow be naturally beneficial to society, because a person perceives them to be beneficial to themselves, it is that nobody else has the right to judge on anyone else’s behalf what is the most beneficial course of action for them. Liberty is more important than one’s own life or anyone else’s life because life is by its nature finite. Liberty by its nature is only liberty if it is infinite. When you make a decision to do something selfless you are not making a libertarian choice, but a Christian one, you are deciding to love your neighbour as yourself. And yet the best way to love your neighbour as yourself in the long run, is to fight for your neighbour’s infinite liberty to make the right choice for himself.
Perhaps the people in the pubs have come to a very arguable view (no matter what the lying politicians say) that this virus can not be eradicated and that it must be faced down at some stage by all populations with an inevitable but not particularly high death rate. To self maximise you either get it early whilst the health system can cope, late when drug treatment regimes have been developed, or very late when a vaccine has been developed. Selfish, maybe a little, but not necessarily stupid.
Libertarians are not defined by an “optimistic view of human nature” – libertarians are defined by a realistic view of government. A realism that James Kirkup sadly lacks. Governments are made up of human beings to – just human beings using force and fear (“nudging” with threats of fines and prison) rather than the voluntary cooperation. And the idea that government can be made up of wise philosopher kings is a delusion that should have died with Plato. Indeed rule by “intellectuals” is one of the worst forms of government, due to their false view of what they can achieve by “nudging” people.
Whether the virus was created by a government (the government of the People’s Republic of China) is not yet known – but what is known is that government regulations in the United States and other nations greatly held up testing and treatment (equipment, transport, hospitals – everything). Both the Federal and the State governments have had to waive many regulations that should not have been passed in the first place. It was not libertarians who passed these regulations James Kirkup. And the regulations were waived far-too-late.
As for the United Kingdom – there was indeed something that government could have done. It could have closed the borders months ago – instead it left the borders of the nation open to the virus (for months).
I’m a Libertarian and you never met a greater misanthrope. I do not believe that human beings are inherently good, or even rational. What I do think is that they are self interested. Over time, enough people enough of the time will make decisions that are in their rational self interest because the consequences of the wrong decisions are abundantly manifest. What government does is shield and protect people from the natural consequences of their irrational actions. Bailing out banks because they are “too big to fail” is a perfect example. Why wouldn’t they now continue to be irrational and reckless with other peoples money?
Two things. In reply to a comment below, Coronavirus 19 is not the same virus as the one that gives us the common cold. Far, from it! It is similar to the cold and flu virus in so far as its from the same group or family but that is in the same way that your pet cat is in the same family as lions and tigers. The main problem is that it spreads quickly and easily and no half decent government should be willing to accept the very real possibility that it’s health care service will have to select who to try and treat and who to leave to die.
On more general point about people seemingly being selfish, I think another factor in all this is that very unfortunately, the messages coming from Johnson were mixed, ever changing and conflicting from day to day. It’s really not that long ago since he was telling us all that of course he was shaking hands with NHS staff and others, and that our response has to be ‘proportionate to the risk’. For some sections of society, no excuse is needed for ignoring government advice ‘one day it’s this, the next it’s that, we’ve heard that sort of rubbish with healthy eating,alcohol etc, they are always changing their advice’.
A different tone and direct, clear messages to us could well have seen a totally different behaviour amongst the pub going population and others .
I’m a little depressed and alarmed to hear the view , often repeated in various circles and contexts, that this is just like the flu, we don’t worry too much about that, it kills many each year but we don’t get the government telling us what to do.
In fact, of course, the situations with flu and Covid19 are completly different.
The Government and the NHS do in fact tell , or should I say, advise us what to do about flu I.e get yourself vaccinated. It’s free for the older amongst us and only £10 (?) for the rest of us. I am pretty sure that if we all followed this advice then every winter, the number of deaths, the number of hospitalisation and the demand on the NHS would fall dramatically. Similarly, the number of days off work would fall.
Coronavirus is somewhat different : a it is more lethal and virulent than flu and b) there is no vaccine.
No, flu is more lethal **as statistics stand at the moment** than coronavirus. The unknown with cv19 as that we don’t know if it will keep on running, or die down as the weather warms in the same way as flu. And there is no vaccine… yet.
I think an important question is why the government doesn’t enforce social distancing measures during flu season if, as they claim, saving human life is a priority? Flu vaccines help but are something like 50-60% effective, and AFAIK that reduces over time.
Is there a tacit agreement between the government and people that the thousands of flu deaths every year are just collateral damage to allow society to function normally?!
At the end of the day, outside their everyday experiences and areas where they have specialist knowledge people don’t have enough information or the time or inclination to acquire it in order to make fully rational decisions.
That’s always seemed to me the fundamental flaw in any theory that assumes the existence of rational actors.
Actions based on what information you have are rational. The government has no more information than the rest of us. Why should we assume their orders are more rational than our own plans?
For heaven’s sake, it is nothing to do with civil liberties. The reason the pubs weren’t closed was because the government was blindly following the theory of HERD IMMUNITY (against the advice of the W.H.O. and most world experts). The Chief Scientific Officer said “we need 60% of the population to become infected”. Yes he said those very words in a press conference. They even produced a standard distribution curve to explain it to the herd. Anybody with school days knowledge of statistics can see that it theoretic. Unfortunately the COVID19 virus don’t know what a binomial is, and will refuse to follow it.
The government’s measured approach was an attempt to manage HERD IMMUNITY. I think they are still trying that approach, but nobody is questioning it. It would be unpatriotic, wouldn’t it?
And there is societal pressure, as well as employer pressure, to “tough it” when ill, instead of staying at home. And, biggest cause of all, is the media frenzy linked to this outbreak. Instead of sticking to the facts, lurid headlines abound to sell newspapers, stoking the mass-hysteria bordering on panic. We will have to wait until the end of the outbreak before we can be certain, but some sort of rein is needed – of the media, not us.
Uh, they might have crowded into pubs in London, but out here in Somerset the pubs completely died before they were shut down. I went in for a ‘final pint’ and I didn’t feel at risk at all, because I was almost the only one there.
I would hazard there is more of a community feeling here than there is in London though.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. I lived in London for many years, and in Somerset for the last 20, and that is my experience too. No wonder – it is hard to have a feeling of community amongst a population of millions, where you very likely have never even spoken to most of your neighbours. It’s pretty hard even to feel empathy for them, frankly….even though there are no doubt some wonderful people amongst them.
Teleconferencing with some colleagues who live in Bath today, they mentioned that they didn’t know their neighbours either – and that is a relatively small and relaxed city.
There is much in this article that needs to be pulled apart and analysed in greater detail. I will mention two. Firstly, while classical economics may be based on the idea of the rational actor, classical liberal views do not require that all decisions be rational. Hayek, for example, particularly stressed the subjectivity of choices. Secondly, this form of liberalism does not suggest that everybody organises, themselves in an optimal manner. There is no suggestion, for instance, that some form of policing and criminal justice will not be required. Greenspan would have been wiser had he understood this. Perhaps we should refer back to Mill’s Harm Principle. Negative externalities are a form of harm that would fall foul of this principle and it is reasonable to think that infecting others is a form of harm. It is a pity that this article fails to properly understand libertarianism and therefore fails to address the issue in an informed manner. Misconstruing the issue does not lead to informed debate – it is just a form of propaganda, really.
“In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.”
At risk of being piled on as a libtard cuck snowflake or whatever the insult du jour is, I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t obvious why libertarianism is so popular among white dudes: because no matter how low, high, or closely or distantly spaced the shelves of society were, they were always on the top one. Even when most humans lived in a mud puddle, they could always take comfort in the fact that it was slightly higher around everyone else. So of course they could reach these conclusions. Ask anyone else, and the answer would be very different.
Thing is, a virus doesn’t care. When the next in line to the British throne comes down with it, libertarianism goes right out the window.
The issue of the lockdown is within the libertarian ideology, if it is taken as being public safety rather than being government throwing its weigh around.
Rather than the danger of a virus, imagine it as a gun control issue. Anyone get’s to own and carry a gun, as part of the libertarian ideal. However, wave your loaded gun around in a public place, and you’ll be shot. Get too close to others and be considered a threat, and again, you will be shot. This is an issue of public threat, and in that mindset, libertarians are happy to let the state take control.
The main problem as I see it is a misunderstanding of the concept of freedom and rational actors. People are free to do as they want, but that doesn’t mean we have no rules or limits. We need a level playing field for it to work, and someone unbiased to enforce it. The alternative is anarchy, where people will cheat to win, and that is not libertarianism.
Everyone can have an opinion and to be able to express them and discuss is a wonderful thing. A myriad of different angles can be put forward ,all reasoning why one of our groups does not wish to listen to advice given. Jesus wept and no wonder. I’m convinced that it’s because then and now we have a large number of ignorant, stupid, moronic cretins who couldn’t give a fig for anybody but themselves. That is until they need the services of the very people they deliberately put at risk. No need to guess who will squeal loudest.
This didn’t age well did it? The tories have shown that they do not have an ounce of libertarianism in them. They are the crony capitalists that I thought they were. Not been impressed by libertarians this year. I do have faith in the philosophy. A libertarian society would protect private property from threats and that includes virus. Without patents to make money for big pharma, being 1st with the best treatments would be the only option without the government indemnity of course. I cannot see the government giving up too much of it’s power anytime soon and joe public has shown the deaths of WW2 were in vain.