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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