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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SubscribeOh the joys of living in Scotland ! Every day feels like Spring has sprung, or at least it seems like every day is April the first.
Since foreign affairs is not a devolved matter the Scottish “government” has no business having a foreign policy at all. It is about as relevant as the foreign policy of the West Wittering District Council.
Point of order, Mr Chairman. West Wittering is part of Chichester District Council.
The SNP have travelled so far down the rabbit hole they’ve shot straight through Wonderland, bypassed Narnia, and missed the turn-off for Oz completely. They are believed currently to be approaching the outskirts of the Land of Wibble.
It would be lovely to ignore them but we can’t, because their delirium has serious repercussions.
These are very unserious people. They’re larpers – playing at being politicians.
No, they’re very serious. They’re enemies using indigenous useful idiots to weaken and demoralize a captive populace. Does Humza Yousaf really care about transgenders or is he using them to further his own ideological and religious ends?
The people of Scotland have to stand up for themselves at the next election and vote these Jokers out!
Exactly. He’s using the Islamic practice of taqiya (dissimulation or cant) to project a lie that a practising Muslim can be a feminist
Seriously, the SNP are a total laughing stock and embarrassment. The Tories won’t be the only party to face a drubbing at the next election.
Great article Joan. The O level modern studies numpties (in all parties), who run Scotland are beyond parody. They should appoint Isla the rapist as Women’s Equality and Health minister job sharing with one of the many Islamic sister grifters they want to promote to MSP. That would truly symbolise that feminist foreign policy.
Well, there can’t have been much fanfare as this is the first I have heard of it.
I bet this is a legacy of the Surgeon strategy that has been launched even though she is not there anymore.
Why isn’t she in prison by now, and where is the big RV that was once in the driveway?
I expect being a man in Yemen isn’t much fun either.
Quite. I wonder who are suffering most in that war, the women left with out partners and fathers or the men left without lives?
Labour’s Foreign policy with an ethical dimension came unstuck on contact with the real world in 1997. The Scottish Government’s feminist foreign policy won’t even get that far.
Perhaps the honest honest foreign policy for the UK Government is to pursue British interests s best it can while avoiding inflicting any crimes against foreign nations
“One of the first objectives of a genuinely feminist foreign policy would be a reduction in violence against women. It’s hard to see how that could be achieved, however, by politicians who insult campaigners for women’s rights and tell us that some men are really women.”
Well, fair enough but I don’t see anything that the Scottish Government to do to achieve a reduction is violence against women in other parts of the world anyway. What’s it going to do, send along a gunship?
Does Scotland even have a navy? That’s news to me.
Oh thank you, Joan. Increasingly Scotland feels like a scary place to live. The desperate scrabble for ‘independence’ at any cost has resulted in many gaining positions as MSPs or councillors without experience, education and frankly intellect that would be demonstrated in an understanding of logic and reason. Frankly, the more they drivvle on about gender, while contradicting themselves endlessly, it reads like a mea culpa from those who were once (and maybe still are) homophobes and misogynists. Their failure to see the majority of women who oppose their Gender Recognition Act were those who in their youth stood by gays throughout the 80s and the 90s, opposed absurd nazi-wannabes through organisations like RAR and the Anti Nazi League. And yet apparently, such women are now suddenly nazi, homophobe racists? Were that the case, surely politicians, social scientists and psychologists would be having a field day, examining this astounding volte face? Some days I despair, but when I look around at the many women waking up to this lunacy, my confidence swells. It remains a mystery though how so many of these politicians are…well just plain stupid and would do almost anything to shine with faux virtue. Instead they will happily pose along side signs demanding women be beheaded…
The title could have been shorter. Something like ‘The absurdity of Scotland’ would have been just fine.
“will leverage all aspects of Scotland’s international policy to advance gender equality and the rights of women, girls and MARGINALISED GROUPS”
A key point that the author didn’t pick up. ISIS and Hammas are marginalised groups. Some groups are marginalised for good reason!
Also, some other “marginalised groups” are the ones oppressing women, eg Muslims in the Middle East and Africa.
I don’t quite understand what Scotland’s foreign policy has to do with gender rights in Yemen, but I agree with the gist and urgency of Joan Smith’s article.
I also think that Holyrood’s violently flaccid and discriminatory policies against women are a product of the existential crisis that Scotland has found itself wrapped up in for the last few decades. Thanks to a flat and neoliberal ideology of rudderless cosmopolitanism espoused mostly to negate an apparent ethnocentrism of the South, but really, to ensure Scotland’s cultural participation in the economic and political fold of neoliberalism, the Scots have slowly abandoned their once rather well-defined, but narrow definition of what it meant to be ethnically and linguistically “Scottish”. Faced with the problem of a mode of political rhetoric that ran counter to its neoliberal agenda, Scottish parties such as the SNP found that the only way in which they could now legitimate their political demands for an independent Scotland was by building, as Arta Moeini put it in a different context on UnHerd, an “ersatz nationalism” based on a shared sense of a felt, “ontological insecurity” – oppression being the only value, or more precisely, sentiment, tangibly constituting the ideological ground for a collective, “national” set of political interests. Insofar as they seek any form of Scottish nationhood, it is therefore incumbent upon the SNP that they ally themselves with anyone that claims oppression, and villify those who challenge the absurdities and implicit violence of these claims, because without it, the party has no ideology or political ground to stand on.
If ontological insecurity is the only means by which the SNP means to will political participation in civil society, then it’s hard to imagine what both the political and cultural future of Scotland might look like. All I can see ahead of me is a neoliberal wasteland of furries who think freedom is the political right to dress like a cartoon character to work.
Thought for a moment there I might finally agree with this author on something. After all there are lots of countries out there with serious issues to be addressed. But no – just another opportunity to bang on about trans in the U.K.
Really, out there, outside the first world and it’s woke obsessions, there are way bigger issues to worry about!
Not sure you have fully understand what the author was saying. This isn’t about trans people at all, it is about the importance of sex, particularly in the lives of women that don’t live in safer Western countries.
Women in those countries experience violence (whether domestic or even cultural FGM, for example) because of their sex, not because of an imagined gender identity.
For the Scottish Government, that seems unable to recognise the significance of sex in citizen’s lives, to witter about gender in those women’s lives is insulting and dangerous. As is your dismissal of Joan pointing this out. Try listening to women.
You need to read the article again I’m afraid.
After the initial two introductory paras the point of every single para right up to the last is about the trans issue.
Drummed home, if you haven’t got it by then, by the last sentence:
If you’re still unable to see this, have a look through this writers other articles.
Depressing that I have to keep pointing this out. Women do not all have the same opinion. They are not clones or a breed of parrots who all think and say the same thing. They are fully fledged human beings with the same breadth of opinion as men. To think otherwise is pure misogyny – or arrogance by those who think that they speak for all women.
If you genuinely “listen to women” you will hear a wide range of opinions on every subject, many of them in conflict with each other. Just as you will with men.
Even on Unherd the range of opinions from women is quite broad. Respect that!