Category: covid-19

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

One of the more interesting things about corona event has been the complete exclusion from the public debate of the economic costs of the measures taken. Of course, politicians always want to exclude discussion of the costs of whatever decision they are making to reduce resistance to those decisions. We rely on the two party system and a functioning media to bring those costs to attention so that the public can make a rounded judgement on an issue. But the costs of the pandemic response have not made it into the mainstream public discourse in any meaningful way.

The absence of a discussion of the economic ramifications is made all the more strange because, for as long as I can remember, the lead news story on any given day was almost always something about the ‘economy’. The rhythms of this news cycle demarcated our lives to a certain extent. The yearly federal budget formed the foundation of these rhythms. It was the kick drum to the snare driven backbeat of the GDP results, the fizzing hi-hat of the monthly jobs data and the inflation statistics while the meetings of the board of the Reserve Bank and the decisions on interest rates made up a nice tom fill with obligatory crash cymbal at the end of the bar. Over the top of all this racket the politicians were the lead singers wailing the high notes of growth, surplus and jobs. Like every AC/DC album since Back in Black, the formula hasn’t changed in decades. But it changed earlier this year as the GDP statistics were replaced by the infection numbers as the centre point around which our lives revolved. Where I live in Melbourne, our premier took on the guise of high priest whose daily press briefings often had a quasi-religious tone as he berated members of the public who had not behaved themselves and prolonged the punishment owing to them. The speculation about the cause of the movement in test positive numbers reminded me of the old speculation about why the stock market went up or down on any given day. That is, an ad hoc explanation for what was essentially a stochastic process.

The politicians have still been running the show, although the members of the backing band have changed from econocrats to health technocrats and the song has changed to a higher tempo and different key. Not the slow, steady, predictable rhythm of stadium rock but a tense, shrill, angsty indie number. Less AC/DC, more Radiohead.

The denial of the economic ramifications from politicians was understandable. What was more interesting and telling was the attitude of the public. This came out in some strange ways, at least in some of the conversations I have had or seen online. For example, I’ve heard a few people say that the solution to the unemployment caused by the corona response is a universal basic income. It’s not clear why that is. Are we unable to create jobs anymore? Do we now live in a world where jobs don’t exist and never will exist again? Once upon a time, our ex-Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said work was our religion. Have we abandoned the faith?

Similarly, if you point out to some people the enormous budget deficits that governments are accruing to pay for the corona response, it’s not uncommon to hear that it doesn’t matter and budget deficits don’t mean anything anyway. That’s certainly news here in Australia where disagreement about the size of any budget deficit was one of the primary differentiating factors between the two main political parties. It’s probably not an understatement to say that elections have been decided because of the size of the budget deficit. But now we no longer care about all that?

This attitude of dismissing what were previously considered important economic metrics was summed up best in words that I actually heard with my own ears earlier in the year: “the economy is not real”. That would be a strange thing to say at the best of times but the statement was made only weeks after the infamous toilet paper shortages where we all experienced the sight of half empty supermarket shelves. You would have thought that an inability to buy food and groceries would have made the realness of the economy clear to people. But apparently not. To be fair, however, the word ‘economy’ was being used by such people in a different sense. In order to understand that different sense we need to take a lightning tour of the development of modern economics as a discipline and the corresponding semantic change it caused in the public discourse.

The word economy is from the Greek oikos – “house” and nemo – “distribute”. It means something like the administration or management of the household. That was the common meaning of the word economy in English right up to the 20^th century. Prior to that, if you wanted to talk about the distribution of wealth at the level of the nation, you were talking about the subject known as political economy and political economy was seen to be a sub-branch of ethics. Thus, Adam Smith’s famous work The Wealth of Nations was in the genre of political economy. In the early 20^th century, economics as the modern academic discipline we all know and love emerged. It was not a branch of ethics or a discussion of household management, but a social science. This ‘science’ eschewed the ethical discussion of political economy in favour of a mathematical approach which was popular in the social sciences of the time and which was driven by the phenomenon known as ‘physics envy’ i.e. the desire to make the study of society as rigorous and respected as physics.

Prior to the 20^th century, the statement ‘the economy is not real’ would have been equivalent to saying that the food on your table is not real or the clothes on your back are not real or your inability to buy toilet paper was not real. But what it means in the modern context is that the ‘science’ of economics is not real. Having done two years of university economics, I have a great deal of sympathy with this idea. In fact, I might go so far as to state that modern economics is completely useless as an area of study. Possibly my favourite example to illustrate that uselessness was a paper I once read on the fairly mundane topic of how consumers choose which petrol station to visit. The author of the study had visited a number of different petrol stations in an area and had noticed that they all had different prices for petrol. He wondered why consumers wouldn’t all go to the one with the lowest price because, even if you had to drive a little bit further, it would work out cheaper to do so. Nevertheless, there were customers at the more expensive stations. Why was this so?

In order to answer this question, he made a long series of arguments referencing other economics papers where theories were expounded about consumer behaviour. On and on it went and eventually he drew some kind of conclusion about the behaviour of consumers in the retail petrol market. But here’s the funny thing: the author could have just asked the motorists themselves. He had already visited the petrol stations to check the prices. Why not just go over and ask a random sample of motorists whether they knew they that the competitor down the road was 5c a litre cheaper? Why not ask them straight out how they decided which petrol station to visit? It would be quite easy to do and he would have got the answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Instead, he simply cited a bunch of other papers none of which contained any empirical studies. It was just a long chain of theories that at no stage bothered to check against reality. The whole thing was a giant exercise in armchair philosophy. This is typical of economics which deals in theory and mathematics without bothering itself much with the real world. (As a side note, within the other social sciences there was a backlash against this kind of thing and a movement towards ‘qualitative studies’ but these have their own set of problems, not the least of which is that they are not reproducible or quantifiable and therefore not really science at all. As far as I know, however, there was no such movement in economics).

If ‘the economy is not real’ means something like ‘economics is not a real science’ then I am in full agreement. However, I don’t think it is just a critique of economics that is meant by the statement ‘the economy is not real’. After all, the same critique could be made of sociology but that wouldn’t lead somebody to say that society was not real (unless they happened to be Margaret Thatcher). I think the rather flippant dismissal of economics we have seen this year is due to the use to which the discipline of economics has been put in the public discourse starting after WW2 but really ramping up in the last few decades. That use can only be described as propaganda.

As I alluded to above, economics has come to fill a central role in public debate. In fact, it’s all we ever hear about. At least, it was all we ever heard about before corona came along. As a (in my opinion) non-science, economics is full of abstractions and layered arguments that only somebody with the capacity for boredom required to sit through four years of university classes on the subject can understand. As such, it is perfectly suited as a tool to befuddle the public with airy abstractions, meaningless metrics and mysterious models all of which help divert attention from the underlying political issues. That is why politicians love economics. It’s an ideal tool of distraction.

At bottom, politics is a system for deciding how to distribute wealth. In a democracy, you vote for politicians who are going to represent your interests, chief among which are your economic interests. This used to be very clear and obvious. The Labor Party existed to represent the economic interests of labour, the Liberal Party to represent capital and the National Party to represent rural interests. Public debate explicitly focused on how decisions affected the economic interests of each of these groups. That changed around the time of the 80s when the Labor Party (and the equivalent parties in other western nations) essentially abandoned its constituency and bought into the neo-liberal agenda. That’s when globalisation kicked off for real and it’s also when economics as a discipline really started to dominate the public discourse and the ‘experts’ and technocrats came to dominate our lives. Appealing to expertise has clear advantages for politicians because it removes the political aspect to any issue. It’s not me as the politician making a decision to screw over a certain part of the population, it’s the science. Because it’s objective and it’s scientific, there’s no real alternative. This has given much of modern political discourse a sense of inevitability. There’s no point in arguing because the government can just appeal to the experts and as a layman you don’t have a leg to stand on. This sense of inevitability was captured perfectly by former Australian Prime Minster, Paul Keating’s, famous phrase ‘the recession we had to have’ or Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’. Gone are the debates of political economy and ethics. Gone even are the discussions of personal interest.

The abstractions used by economists work perfectly as tools of propaganda precisely because they are hard to grasp. If they meant something concrete, it would make it easier for the average person to understand and therefore to object. For this reason, economics was a favourite theme of the great Australia/New Zealand comedy duo Clarke and Dawe who mercilessly targeted experts as they appeared in the public discourse. One of my favourite examples of their work is this video where John Clarke plays an expert who is asked to explain the Australian energy market. It’s specifically relevant to the theme of this post because it juxtaposes the nonsense of the experts against the everyday reality of people having to pay more money for electricity (which is part of the real economics of household management). What the average citizen wants to know is why their electricity bills are going up. What they get is a bunch of abstract drivel which hides that fact that vested interests behind the scenes have stitched up the situation to their advantage.

So, perhaps the statement ‘the economy does not exist’ is really the rejection of the propaganda of economics. This makes a great deal of sense. It’s the public finally saying that they have had enough of the nonsense they have been fed for decades. This would tie in with the palpable but strange sense of relief felt by many people as corona kicked off. I’ve had the very strong impression that a number of people have supported the corona measures precisely because they represent a break with the past. The government finally did something. In this way, the rejection of economics might seem like a step in the right direction. Are we finally throwing off the shackles of expertise and returning to a proper political discussion based on interests and ethics where the interests of the public can be adequately represented in the discourse?

Sadly, not. All that has really happened this year is that one form of propaganda got replaced with another. The GDP statistics were swapped out for the infection statistics. The numbers are different but the game is the same. The politicians still appeal to ‘science’ to justify their decisions only now the science is not economics but epidemiology. The Queensland premier, in particular, has been fond of pointing out that all the difficult choices are really made by her chief medical officer and are therefore not even a matter of politics. Meanwhile, here in Victoria, our premier claims that all his decisions are based on ‘science’ and anybody who disagrees with him is, by definition, not being scientific. Again, the layman is left powerless in the face of expertise. Again, the sound of the church bells of ‘science’ ring loud and call the faithful to prayer.

“Do you hear that, Mr Anderson?”

Or, as the lyric from one of my favourite Who songs goes: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The irony of it all is that, just like the creator of GDP said that it should never be used as a measurement of economic performance, so too the inventor of the PCR said it should not be used as a diagnostic tool of viral disease. Logically this should be a problem. But when it comes to propaganda, meaningless numbers are a feature not a bug. If the numbers meant something, they could be argued against.

What the corona event represents is a ramping up of the propaganda to new heights. Coupled with the authoritarian turn in politics it presents a rather scary vision for the future. Will the old economics ever return as the propaganda tool of choice? Will we be permanently stuck with the new propaganda of corona statistics? It’s hard to say. A lot will depend on what happens with the real world that sits beneath the noise and which our public discourse seems to have less and less to do with.

None of that is much in the control of any of us. But there is one thing that is in our control and that is to rediscover the true meaning of economics as household management and to also rediscover political economy as a discipline of real economics founded in ethics. In other words, we can ask in what ways can we ensure a supply of goods to our own households (or produce them ourselves) and we can determine what our real economic interests are and whether there are any politicians who actually represent those interests rather than just spout propaganda. The real economy seems set for a period of rapid change. It would be wise for individuals to hedge their households against the risks of that change because no amount of propaganda is going to put food in the pantry.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

This week I was reading one of those classic media articles on ‘science’. It was of the exact type I identified in post 7 in this series. The headline was of the form “experts increasingly believe that X may cause Y.” Then you read the body of the report and, lo and behold, the experts are saying nothing much at all. There is no real evidence, just speculation. But that doesn’t stop the journalist writing an entire article that presupposes the speculation was true. The article in question, of course, was full of those lovely qualifiers I also mentioned in post 7 which get peppered throughout such ‘science’ reports: would, could, may, might have, could have etc.

What made this article stand out was not the rampant speculation or the use of the familiar hedging language but the fact that it had been shared on social media in such a way as to present the framing of the article as established fact, which it clearly wasn’t. The article wasn’t about the science of corona directly. Rather, it was about how the lockdowns had apparently led to a decrease in premature births. The speculation in question was that pregnant women who didn’t have to work are less likely to have a premature baby. That was the editorial framing and the person who shared the article assumed that framing to be true (again, there was no hard evidence it was just speculation).

Two things struck me about this specific article. Firstly, the argumentation was all but a non sequitur. The chain of reasoning was the lockdown led to women working less which reduced stress which led to fewer premature babies. That’s a long bow with a lot of moving parts. You’d need some detailed investigation to try and prove it but there was no such investigation in the article. The idea also doesn’t make a lot of sense even without that investigation. Were women really less stressed at the height of the corona hysteria while locked in their house worried about a super deadly virus running rampant? Of course, as I noted above, the scientists that were interviewed weren’t actually suggesting that. They simply noted the statistics were interesting. It was the reporter filling in the argumentation. It was the manner of that ‘argumentation’ which is important and leads me to the second point about such articles.

Such articles are a kind of social activism. It wasn’t just sloppy science. It wasn’t just misleading reporting. It was sloppy science and misleading reporting with a social agenda. It was that combination which struck me for the first time this week because the whole corona event has ties to different social agendas and, as I have tried to demonstrate in earlier posts in this series, is predicated on what could most politely be described as sloppy science. That’s why we hear about the ‘new normal’ or the ‘great reset’. So, this seemed like another of those microcosm-macrocosm examples. This relatively insignificant little article was a small example of a larger pattern that defines the whole corona event. In order to understand that pattern, we need to establish what I see as the three main categories of people in the general public as relates to their general disposition to the corona event. We will then see that the practice of tying the corona event to social goals is related to a specific group of people.

The first and, I think, the largest group are what I’m going to call – The Baffled – as I think this sums up their general attitude to corona. This group consists primarily of the working class and middle class; pretty much anybody in society that didn’t go to university. I don’t mean this as a comment on the intelligence of this group; anybody who paid attention in high school math and science, indeed anybody who can think logically, should be able to navigate the science around corona. I also think that these days the average uni graduate is dumber than the average non-graduate for a variety of reasons. The distinction here is not one about intellectual capabilities but more around cultural and individual perceptions of those capabilities. The Baffled decide in advance that they are not able to understand the science and so they don’t even try. For this reason, they don’t have any sophisticated opinions about the corona event. The Baffled may seem to agree with the official narrative but if you question them on aspects of it they will quickly throw their hands up in the air and exclaim that they just want it to be over. A fairly common sense position and one that you would think be shared by pretty much everybody.

A second group is The Dissenters, of which I am a member. These are the people who write long series of blog posts and wonder whether western civilisation is about to descend into a medico-fascist dystopia.

The third group are The True Believers, a term which captures the quasi-religious zealotry exhibited by its members. This is the group that upholds the mainstream narrative most vociferously. They are likely to be found on social media (and sometimes in real life) reminding people to wear a fucking mask and stay the fuck at home. For them, no price is too high a price to pay to avoid a death “from corona” although they are noticeably disinterested in deaths from any other cause. For this reason, if you raise the subject of the collateral damage caused by the political reaction to the corona event they will wave it away as irrelevant. Dan Andrews, the premier where I live and leader of the True Believer brigade in this state, is a paradigm exemplar of this technique. I could give numerous examples but one that was asked of him last week was quite a nice case in point. He was asked whether he cared whether any of his lockdown measures violated the human rights of the citizens of his state. He replied with something like “would they prefer to be on a ventilator in hospital”? This is both a non sequitur and also patently false on basic factual grounds (the overwhelming majority of the population has no risk of ending up on a ventilator but 100% chance of having their human rights violated by the lockdowns). But these are the kinds of ‘argument’ that are commonplace when trying to ‘debate’ with True Believers about the corona event.

The True Believers are, almost always, university educated and members of the salary class of society. Unlike The Baffled, this group thinks of themselves as capable enough to understand the science behind corona and usually has read enough to have formulated somewhat sophisticated arguments about why the mainstream narrative is true. All these arguments rely on an absolute faith in the PCR test and the results generated by it. There is also required an unwillingness or inability to put the statistics in a broader context, a problem seen in the article I referenced above and pointed out by the experts in that article. The lockdown, they said, was just one data point; interesting but certainty not definitive. More research was required. True Believers miss this subtlety. For this reason, they will read such articles and think they refer to actual scientific fact rather than speculation. In this way they betray a complete lack of scepticism and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that such people cannot think scientifically at all. Rather, they are live action roleplaying what it looks like to think scientifically by parroting canned positions presented to them in the media. In a way, this is not that surprising. The True Believers are highly educated and modern high school and university education is all about learning to regurgitate back what was fed to you. Attending university amounts to nothing more than spending four more years learning how to regurgitate the ‘right’ answer.

But recall that what was being fed in that article I mentioned above was not just ‘science’ but also a social agenda. In fact, such articles are really social agendas dressed up as science. Having women work as little as possible in the lead up to a pregnancy sounds like basic common sense to me. But you could, if you wanted, try and justify the position on moral grounds. Once upon a time, you might have justified it on religious grounds. But the article in question was using ‘science’ to make the argument. This is a common rhetorical trick because it means nobody has to take responsibility for the position. It’s not my moral position. It’s not me presenting a preferred political agenda. It’s ‘science’. You can’t argue with science. It’s the objective truth, after all. Thus, the common criticism made by the True Believers of others is that they are too stupid to understand the ‘science’. (Ironically, women not working in paid employment during pregnancy would once upon a time have been the default setting in our society and it was ‘progress’ which changed this state of affairs but let’s leave that uncomfortable fact to the side for now).

This pattern of tying the corona event to unrelated social and political issues is something I have seen a number of times this year and every time it happens you can be sure it’s a True Believer making the argument. One of the funnier examples from my home city revolved around a golf course in an inner city suburb where the local hipster/environmentalist residents were trying to argue that, as part of ‘covid normal’, the course should be opened up to the public. What has a viral pandemic got to do with a local issue about access to a golf course? Nothing at all. But these people apparently thought that tying the issue to corona would increase their chances of a favourable outcome. I saw another example where somebody was making the argument that a universal basic income would have helped solved some of the issues around corona by making people more likely to stay at home. A third was that X millions of litres of petrol would not be burned because of all the people working from home and not commuting the office, so corona was good for the environment. If the True Believers have become expert at dismissing any criticism of the lockdowns, they have also become adept at finding any flicker of positive news to try and justify them. (On the subject of corona and the environment, Cory Morningstar has an excellent article here showing the environmental fallout caused by all the trillions of single-use plastic masks that are going to be thrown away in the next years. Show it to a True Believer and watch them try and weasel out of that one).

The implication of the True Believer position is that the corona event will change society (for the better). Again, this is just the myth of progress rehashed. But it’s also begging the question. Why does society need to change? Is there any actual reason why the corona event should lead to permanent change? On current course, if you believe the official statistics and think they are comparable to past pandemics, corona is on track to be about as lethal as the Hong Kong flu in 1968. Nobody sought to change society back then. In fact, as I have already mentioned in past posts, people at the time didn’t seem concerned at all about the flu. At least, not in the media. The truth is, there’s no reason at all why we couldn’t go back to exactly how we were before. The fact that this idea seems radical has everything to do with the control of the dominant narrative by the True Believers. The idea of going back to normal is, in fact, the position of The Baffled. They might think that wearing masks is necessary but they get no pleasure in wearing masks and will be happy to cease doing so as soon as they can. The same goes for social distancing and all the other measures. But that is not the attitude of the True Believer. The True Believer wears the mask with a gusto that betrays a millenarian impulse.

This millenarian impulse is explicitly at work in the concepts of the new normal and the great reset and it is here where the cultural and philosophical differences between the three groups I have described above becomes explicitly political. The language used by the proponents of the great reset is the language of the True Believers. We hear how the corona event presents a unique opportunity to re-shape society. Indeed, one that may never happen again. Not only will the tyranny of local golf courses in suburban Melbourne be overthrown, but the entire structure of the world economy will be reshaped. Of course, this is also a complete non sequitur. Just like the non sequiturs that have been characteristic of the entire mindset of the True Believers all throughout the corona event. There is no logical, scientific or political reason for it. It is simply asserted. And it has been asserted time and again so much now that it has become the default position. However, it is only the True Believers who really believe it. The Baffled might go along with it to the extent that they can’t see how it will directly affect them, but they don’t believe in it. Thus, the official narrative of the corona event is a projection of, by and for the True Believers or, to say the same thing, the salary class. The delusional and surreal way in which the corona event has played out really does seem a kind of mental breakdown on the part of the True Believers and that mental breakdown has been projected onto the whole of society. This is the reason why it’s so dangerous. The most irrational party in a negotiation usually wins because the other side simply cuts their losses and give up rather than argue with them. Is Western society about to give in to a millenarian ‘new normal’? It seems like a real possibility.

And this is where the different politics in different Western nations suddenly becomes highly relevant to how the corona event will play out. Assuming we have the following groups: there’s The Baffled – Working Class, who are quietly hoping this will all just go away. There’s The Dissenters who are aware they are in the minority and watch on with mild horror as things unfold. And then there’s the True Believer – Salary Class who, although not a majority, have ownership of the official narrative and are highly motivated to see some kind of permanent reshaping of society. At time of writing we are about to see a US presidential election. Western European nations are going back for a second dose of lockdown. And, in Australia and New Zealand, we are waiting to be rescued by the vaccine fairies.

The big difference between these three (US, western Europe, Aus/NZ) is the Trump revolution has already taken place in the US. That revolution was a working class revolt against the salary class. Although, in theory, a similar revolt occurred with Brexit, I think Boris Johnson’s behaviour during the corona event betrays that he is not a Trump-like figure and that realisation is probably also sinking in for his supporters in the UK right now. The working class are the majority in all cases and so political action requires them to be either supportive of the measures in question or at least to not actively oppose them. That revolves mostly around whether you have a leader like Trump who knows how to mobilise that class which is exactly what he has done.

Given these dynamics, what can we expect to see happen politically from now on?

If, as I expect, Trump wins the election and the republicans also take congress, I think corona will cease to be a political issue in the US almost immediately. Trump has already maneuvered perfectly for just that outcome. I think if he wins he will sack Fauci immediately and take other steps to try and put corona back in the box. Whether specific states resist those efforts is another question but even if they do corona should settle down to become a local political issue and not a national one in the US.

Australia/New Zealand and western Europe are in very different places politically but the unifying element is that there is nobody trying to unite the working class against the corona measures. For that reason, it seems quite likely that the aspirations of the True Believer – Salary Class have a chance of being realised in those countries. What that looks like in practice is anybody’s guess. Mandatory vaccinations, vaccine passports and similar measures seem a real possibility.

I remember half joking way back in April that each country’s response to corona would define the political direction of that country for the next couple of decades. If I’m right, this means that western Europe, Australia and New Zealand are going to see the continued dominance of the True Believer – Salary Class at the expense of the working class while America may escape that fate.

Time will tell.

Addendum:

In a nice bit of synchronicity, the day after I wrote this post a link to a Lancet editorial popped up in my twitter feed. It is possibly the perfect example of exactly what I have been talking about in this post: the confluence of quasi-science and social activism. Here’s a quote to give you the flavour:

COVID-19 is a syndemic of coronavirus infection combined with an epidemic of non-communicable diseases, both interacting on a social substrate of poverty and inequality. The message of GBD is that unless deeply embedded structural inequities in society are tackled and unless a more liberal approach to immigration policies is adopted, communities will not be protected from future infectious outbreaks and population health will not achieve the gains

The first sentence is a demonstration of doublespeak that would have made the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Truth jealous. The second states that ‘protection’ from infectious disease comes from more liberal immigration policy. Again, this is a complete non sequitur and fits the exact pattern described above.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

When I started thinking about writing this series of essays, I had the intuition that the corona event was very similar to things I had seen in my professional life working in IT. My point of departure was to investigate how we tested for coronavirus and this led me to the PCR test. This was of semi-professional interest to me because I am tester in my working life and therefore have an interest in test techniques. It was my disbelief that we were relying on the PCR test exclusively to determine ‘infections’ that led me down the rabbit hole that became these posts. I have touched on the high modernist ideology in other posts in this series but in this post I want to focus on a lower level element of that ideology which exists in the medical industry and which I have seen in my professional life: automation.

The automation ideology was a big thing back when I was starting out as a software tester. So big, in fact, that people were predicting that the job of software tester would disappear. This was obviously of great interest to me at the time because I had just started what looked like becoming a career in that field and so the idea that my job was going to be made redundant was a bit of a worry. So, I paid great interest to the debate. The idea was that testing was going to be automated and, as software developers would be the ones creating the automation, the job of tester would disappear. I was part of a sub-culture in the testing community that was highly critical of this idea because we defined testing as a skilled activity that could not be automated away. That didn’t mean automation wasn’t useful, just that it was a tool to be used by a skilled tester to carry out their work. As it turned out, the job of software tester hasn’t disappeared although there are now a great many jobs for the role of ‘automation tester’.

The upshot of all this is that I have seen the automation ideology first hand in my professional life. I know how that story gets told and I know the differences between that story and reality. Automation comes at a cost. It requires specialised knowledge and skill in writing code. Once built, automation must be maintained. Very rarely have I been involved in an honest discussion about the costs and benefits of automation. There have been a number of times I have tried to have an honest debate about it, usually during a job interview. On one occasion I was able to convince an employer to hire me instead of an automation engineer and that was a small victory on my part. Mostly, however, such discussions don’t go well. I remember one job interview where I asked why they wanted an automation engineer and the people doing the hiring looked at each other with blank faces. It was clear they had never been asked the question before. They spluttered out something about automation being ‘best practice’ before changing the topic. This is the ideology of automation. Within the politics of an organisation, you get rewarded for implementing automation not because it’s a good idea but because it’s ideologically correct.

I could probably fill an entire book with the problems with automation. Let me give the reader just one example to give a flavour for the kinds of issues that exist. Let’s use Facebook because everybody knows it and there was a story about them a while ago that I found amusing. They had replaced their testers with automation. This meant that nobody was actually watching the site diagnostics in real time. Instead, they had a suite of automation tests that would alert somebody when there was a problem. The engineers at Facebook released a new version of the software and some of the performance metrics dropped precipitously. Specifically, the page load time went to almost zero. That sounds like good thing. If a webpage normally takes 0.5 seconds to load and now it takes 0.01 seconds to load, that’s good. In theory, we just improved the performance of our site by more than an order of magnitude. Nobody had set up an automated test to check for a scenario where the page load time got quicker. They only had tests for when the page took too long to load. An engineer looking at those metrics in real time, however, would know that something was wrong. Page load time doesn’t just go down by that much for no reason. Any reasonably smart engineer would at least investigate to see why that had happened. That didn’t happen at Facebook because they had replaced those engineers with automation. Therefore, their site went down and, of course, when Facebook goes down it makes the news. (The reason the page load time had gone to almost zero was because all of the content on the page wasn’t loading due to a bug in the software that had just been released on that occasion.)

Of course, if Facebook goes down it’s not really a big deal. Nobody is going to die or get seriously injured and one could actually make a strong argument that it would be good for Facebook to go down more often so that people switch their phones off for a while and go outside and get some fresh air. But imagine if the same automation ideology was applied to software that was running mission critical systems where perhaps even life and death was involved. In that case, a missed automation test would be very costly indeed and a company which implemented such a practice would probably be sued for negligence. In this scenario, the choice to use automation is an engineering decision that can and should be justified on solid principles, not just some fad among middle managers.

The practical effect of the automation ideology is to remove a person from the equation. In this way, it ties directly to the heroic materialism of the industrial revolution that I outlined in post 11 in this series. The industrial revolution slowly got rid of human labour from manufacturing. In the last few decades, there has begun the attempt to get rid of human labour from other industries. The IT industry is just one. It turns out, the same thing has been happening in the medical industry and this is where the PCR test and the corona event come into the picture.

Normally, if you are sick, you go to a doctor who makes a diagnosis based on your symptoms. That is a skilled activity where the training and experience of the doctor plays a crucial role. Of course, doctors don’t always get it right. I have a couple of stories from personal experience and also know of several more dramatic ones from friends and family where a doctor got it wrong. Of course, we should hold the doctor to account in case they were actually negligent in such cases. But nevertheless, it’s a fact of life in complex domains that people will make mistakes. The human body and human health is an extremely complex system and we neither can nor should expect that doctors can get it right every time. There are too many variables at play. Most of the tests used in medicine are an aid to the doctor. They are like the doctor’s toolkit and just like any tool they must be used wisely and their results interpreted. They don’t guarantee a perfect diagnosis every time but they hopefully enable more accurate diagnoses overall. The idea that the doctor can be replaced by the tool, is the automation ideology applied to medicine and, in fact, that is exactly what we have seen during the corona event. Doctors were replaced by the PCR test. To become a confirmed covid ‘case’ did not require a doctor to diagnose symptoms, it just required a test to give a result. In this way, the corona event is a prime time example of the automation ideology at work.

In previous posts, I documented the timeline of the PCR test taking over in this way a process which took place during the last 10-15 years. However, it is not just the PCR test where the automation ideology has been at play in the medical field. There are a number of other medical tests which have been applied in a similar way. One example is the use of regular mammograms which is a practice that has been recommended for women of certain age groups for quite a long time now. Note that the idea of a regular screening fits the pattern of automation ideology: you don’t go to see a doctor and have clinical symptoms diagnosed, you just go and get the test done. Thus, there is an implicit faith in the test to give accurate results. However, mammograms, like all biological tests, have a false positive problem and because the illness in question is cancer the ramifications of false positives are extremely high. Cancer treatments are highly dangerous and damaging to the body. If a false positive leads you to get treatment when you didn’t need it, that’s a big problem. It means you went through a painful treatment process unnecessarily. In this case, the excessive faith in automation has very real consequences for individuals.

On in recent years has the costs of the mammogram testing program been coming to light and there are now a number of experts who claim that such screening programs do more harm than good. Here is one article that outlines this position. The following quote is pertinent:-

“There are significant harms associated with mammography screening and no reliable evidence of benefit. It is time to discontinue routine mammograms for all healthy women of a particular age. Resources should be shifted toward surveillance of women at higher risk for breast cancer, diagnostic workup for women with a change in their breast that does not go away and for ensuring that women receive timely treatment for a confirmed invasive breast cancer.

Population-based mammography screening has opportunity costs for the health care system, not to mention the social, financial, interpersonal and emotional costs to women and their families.”

Substitute the phrase ‘mammography screening’ with ‘PCR testing’ and change the breast cancer references to flu-like symptoms and the above paragraphs serve equally well as a critique of the approach taken during the corona event. At base, the problem is the automation ideology that drives the whole approach.

There are, of course, good tests and bad tests. Good examples of automation and bad ones. In my experience, automation can be very useful as a tool used by a professional who understands in detail what the automation can do. Every single time I have seen automation implemented as a standalone artifact, the costs far outweigh benefits even in domains where nothing really important is at stake. But that is exactly what has happened with the use of the PCR test. Although humans were involved in the processing of the test, the process itself is a fixed series of steps which doesn’t require any interpretation from humans. Somebody takes your swab, somebody transports it to the lab, somebody at the lab carries out the procedure and then you get the result. That result is final. Doesn’t matter if you have symptoms. Doesn’t matter why you were tested in the first place. There is no weighing up of probabilities about whether the test was a false positive or not and no consideration for the ramifications on your life of a potential false positive.

There are, of course, a number of other problems with the PCR test and I was very interested to see news this week of a potential case aimed at proving in court that the PCR test is not fit for purpose. Here is a video where the lawyer in question, Reiner Fuellmich, gives a great summary of the issues – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UQLqWJJ8AY&ab_channel=RubberRing

In my experience, wherever the automation ideology appears, it is almost always combined with a combination of hubris and naivete. The people who promulgate it are usually educated people who have little on the ground experience in the real world. When such people take up managerial positions in bureaucracies and corporations, there is a natural disincentive for the negative consequences of automation to be reported back to them and, of course, it is highly unlikely that such people will seek out that feedback. I would be very surprised if the PCR test approach taken by governments can hold up in court. On the other hand, the scale of the financial cost associated with what has happened is so enormous that there will no doubt be every conceivable political pressure placed on such cases to not find the state liable for that damage. Nevertheless, I can’t help but hope that this and similar cases do find governments liable if for no other reason than to see the automation ideology suffer some real world consequences for once.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

Well, this ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would but I have finally got the book version of this series of posts finished and out there in the real world.

The title of the book is “The Plague Story and Other Essays: Re-evaluating the Coronavirus Narrative.” For those who have read through some or all of this series of posts, the overall direction of the book is the same. However, I have spent a significant amount of time cleaning up the argumentation, making certain themes more explicit and presenting my argument in a more coherent and logical fashion.

Ebook: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B08KFSSM8L

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0648948617

(Note: I link to Amazon here because unfortunately Australian online retailers inflate the price of self-published books to almost double. Overseas readers should be able to find the paperback version at an online store in their own country).

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona