Some Learn, Others Don't


Tim Harford gives a quick and dirty list of actions to tackle COVID-19: China and South Korea imposed severe curtailments, south east Asia and India imposed slightly milder versions, Germany focussed on massive testing and contact-tracing, Sweden focussed on herd immunity and the US?
“The response has been so diverse across different states as to defy easy description.”

Then there’s the issue I’ve mentioned many times: the West stubbornly refuses to learn from the East. Harford digs into why that is the case:
“One problem they identified — which is both pathetic and all too human — is that it is simply more convenient to learn from countries with a shared language. There is plenty of information in the UK about what is going on in New Zealand, the US, and Anglo-fluent Sweden. Dispatches from South Korea or Vietnam seem to come from a different planet.”
But having access to that info isn’t enough:
“The people in the UK government with contacts in Hanoi and Seoul are not necessarily those with contacts in public health and epidemiology.”
Like it or not:
“Ideology matters, too. For some politicians, the US is the role model to be emulated. For others, Scandinavia is the paragon. The current British cabinet seems disinclined to learn anything from Germany, while nobody seems to care about Vietnam.”
Worse, some lessons don’t “translate” meaningfully to other countries. Why not?
“Each place has its own institutions, culture and history. In most policy areas, lessons do not easily translate. There is a limit to how much the UK really can learn from Japanese banking regulators, or what Ethiopia can conclude from a study of German pensions. The starting points are so far apart that the lessons are obscure.”

Everything Harford applies to the West, except the US. The US has a whole other issue dealing with the epidemic. Maryland Governor, Larry Hogan wrote that health experts had warned a panel of Governors in February of the dangers:
“It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals.”
Or as John Gruber puts it scathingly:
“The president’s response to the COVID-19 crisis puts the lie to the notion that the fundamental problem with Trump and his remaining supporters is about the left/right political divide. It’s about the science/anti-science divide, deferring to expertise vs. defiant know-nothing-ism as a political stance.”

In India, we are nowhere near out of the woods, but I don’t see anything glaringly wrong or stupid about the policies being taken at either the Center or individual State levels. Who’d have thought that we’d see the day when the East has coherent policies while the West runs around like headless chicken?

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