Joseph Delaney points to a silly post on twitter by an economist (nobody famous this time, just someone on the internet) who writes:
If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else.
So if people refusing a vaccine bother you, it’s only because you admit it’s not completely safe and/or effective.
As Delaney points out, this is ridiculous for many reasons, first that nothing in life is 100% safe or 100% effective, second that if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to not take it would definitely have an effect. By not taking the vaccine, you can spread the disease to other people who don’t have the vaccine. This could kill them!
If you want to argue against vaccines using cost-benefit reasoning, go for it. I doubt I’d be convinced, but you can lay out the costs and benefits and make your case. Maybe the person who wrote the tweet feels the social costs are too high. But the direct benefits are clear—even more so if the vaccine is 100% safe and 100% effective. So I don’t think this twitter guy has thought this through at all.
I guess he was trying to be clever but just didn’t think it through. I wonder if part of this is a problem within the field of economics, where there’s a bit of a tradition of silly-clever arguments being celebrated (see here, for example).
Silly arguments occur in all fields of social science, as you can see if you scan through some psychology or sociology journals (not to mention the depths of decadent postmodernism etc.). Ummm, yeah, we have transparently silly arguments in political science too! I guess the point is that different fields have different forms of silly. In political science, the silly can come from measuring something and sticking a name on it, without thinking whether the name fits the measurement. In psychology, the silly comes from running an experiment on 30 people on Mechanical Turk and making general claims about human nature. In other fields, the silly comes from flat-out gobbledygook, as in the famous Sokal paper. In economics, a popular form of silly is the good-is-bad argument. Sometimes the good-is-bad argument has real oomph, as with Adam Smith’s famous paean to the self-interest of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker; other times, as with the quote above, it’s just silly counterintuitiveness for its own sake.
To put it another way: in life, elasticities are typically between 0 and 1, which means that policies typically don’t work quite as well as you might hope (that’s the elasticity less than 1), but they typically go in the intended direction (that’s the elasticity more than 0).
I know, #Notalleconomists. I’m not saying that most or even many economists don’t understand vaccines; I’m just saying that I can see how the error demonstrated in the above quote could appeal to some economists. Similarly, not many political scientists would say that North Carolina is less democratic than North Korea, but some prominent political scientists did attach their reputations to that claim, and it’s the kind of confusing-the-measurement-with-the-reality sort of mistake that political scientists sometimes make.
But I wasn’t really here to talk about economics.
The question that really interested me is how could someone be so wrong on such a simple thing? OK, we live in a world where people deny the existence of school shootings—but in that case the argument is so elaborate that I’d argue that the complexity of the story is part of its appeal. This vaccine thing seems simpler. So what’s going on?
Delaney picked up on a clueless tweet—but the world is full of clueless tweets. I followed the link and the person who wrote the above quote seems to be a bit of a political extremist, for example linking to an Alex Jones fan (which is what got me thinking about school shooting deniers). So the natural thought is that the person who wrote that twitter post is stuck in an echo chamber.
We hear a lot about media echo chambers—go on Facebook or Twitter or even TV news and you’ll hear just one side of the story. In this case, though, it’s more complicated. Following the link, you’ll see that many of the twitter commenters strongly disagreed with the above-quoted post, and many even went to the trouble of explaining what was wrong. But that didn’t seem to matter. The person who wrote the tweet just sarcastically brushed aside all the arguments in the other direction.
I see this a lot when I look things up on twitter. It’s not an echo chamber—in any thread, you’ll often get two strongly opposed perspectives, but typically:
(a) It’s only two perspectives, not three or more, and
(b) Nobody seems to be listening to the other perspective.
So it’s kinda weird. The outcome seems very much what you’d get from an echo chamber, but in the actual process, people are exposed to both sides of an issue. It’s a kind of non-debate debate.
I’m not sure how to think about this, but let me raise a complicating factor, which is that in many of these debates there really are clear right and wrong sides. For example, in the above debate, the claim “If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else” is some mixture of uninformed, foolish, illogical, and flat-out wrong. This happens a lot. Just as most forecast probabilities are close to 0 or to 1, with only a few events being highly uncertain, it’s my impression that in most debates, when looked at from the outside, have a clear right and wrong position. Other times things are more ambiguous, but that can arise from a debate having multiple dimensions, so that the two sides are each right about a different aspect of the disagreement.
I assume that some scholars of communication have looked at this “non-debate debate” phenomenon, where people are exposed to both sides of an issue but don’t even register the opposing arguments. I’ve seen some pretty extreme cases recently where most of the participants in a dispute refuse to even consider the arguments on the other side. But they’re still being exposed to them!
OK, that’s about it for me on this one. I don’t know how to think about this, but I think that my naive earlier view that people were in echo chambers . . . that story ain’t quite right.
He could also be wrong on purpose, e.g. advancing a particular economic/political agenda. Social media has a lot of that too!
Murphy’s tweet is dumb, but this is a bizarre post for a number of reasons.
“Nobody famous this time, just someone on the internet” – What exactly determines fame for you? Being well respected among academics? I’m not saying he’s a household name, but he’s well known in some circles, has published several books that sell, etc. He has more twitter followers than you and I’d certainly say you are famous.
“By not taking the vaccine, you can spread the disease to other people who don’t have the vaccine.” I gather his whole point was that anyone this person spreads the disease to could have taken the vaccine but chose not to, so why should we care? This ignores several real world constraints, such as people not being able to take the vaccine for various reasons. Again, it’s a dumb and unhelpful tweet, but it seems you haven’t put any effort into trying to understand his actual point.
“I wonder if part of this is a problem within the field of economics.” “The person who wrote the above quote seems to be a bit of a political extremist”. Here’s a stats question for you. If I take a sample from what I know is the tail of a population’s distribution, should I make inferences about the population from that?
Justin:
Thanks for the comments. I don’t think any of them have any bearing on my larger point, which is the way in which the twitter comments are not exactly an echo chamber, because they’re full of both “pro” and “con” comments, but there’s still an echo-chamber-like aspect, in that the pro and con commenters aren’t engaging with each other. Regarding the specifics:
1. Fair enough. Just because I’d never heard of this person, it doesn’t mean he’s not famous in some quarters. Indeed, if Murphy were not famous in some sense, I guess Delaney wouldn’t have spent the time pointing out his error.
2. I don’t think the argument in your third paragraph makes sense, in part because, as you note, some people aren’t able to take the vaccine (indeed, there are lots of countries where the vaccine is hard to find), and even more directly because even people who had the vaccine available but chose not to take it are other people. It’s kind of exhausting to have to spell this out, but here goes: Murphy wrote, “If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else.” First, as noted above, nothing is 100% safe or effective, nor is anyone claiming that. Second, if suppose person A does not take the vaccine, catches the disease and has serious symptoms, maybe even dies, and also passes it on to unvaccinated person A who catches the disease and has serious symptoms, maybe even dies. Then person A’s decision to not take the vaccine has a big effect on person B, who is part of the category “everyone else.” So yeah, I agree with you that Murphy’s statement is “dumb and unhelpful.” It did not actually take any effort on my part to understand his actual point, but it did take some effort to write the sentences above going into detail about what he got wrong.
I guess this is part of the problem. Some arguments are just so bad that it’s exhausting to go to the trouble of explaining that they’re wrong—and this is particularly frustrating when the people who make these arguments don’t engage at all with criticism. The comment above from random_walking makes sense. It could well be that Murphy is not making his argument seriously, that he just thought it sounded good when we wrote it or maybe he didn’t think it through at all, and then he moved on to the next tweet. Sometimes it’s a political strategy to flood the zone with whatever arguments come to hand, just to fire up your own side and keep the opposition busy. We see this with “outrage of the day” reporting and we saw it with those claims of hundreds of dead voters after the election, so I guess it makes sense we could see that in the realm of public health too. To me, an argument such as Murphy’s that is logically incoherent is even more ridiculous than people passing along a doctored image or misleading youtube clip—but I guess there are all part of the same category, which is some mix of bad-faith arguments and people unthinkingly believing things that were told to them.
3. Regarding the connection to economics more generally: I’m not sure. This is just my speculation here, not really based so much on this one case as on a larger pattern I’ve seen of silly-clever arguments in which economists temporarily forget that elasticities are typically between 0 and 1, not at the extremes. But, yeah, it’s just something I’ve thought about; I offer no systematic evidence on that one.
“If the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to not take it would definitely have an effect.” I think you can reinterpret Murphy to mean that if vaccines were 100% safe and effective, not getting a vaccine does not have an effect that all parties are not willing to risk.
I do think his comment reflects some of the debate over when to start going about life normally rather than requiring vaccines to keep one’s job (or do one’s job or go to school). Everyone 12+ has access to a highly effective vaccine (particularly against serious disease and death). What’s the actual proportion of the eligible population that cannot get the vaccine? How big would that proportion need to be for mitigation measures or vaccine mandates to be lifted?
As a new father years ago, I got a dose of the Tdap vaccine to protect my child from pertussis and diphtheria. If the idea is that we could potentially get someone sick who can’t get a vaccine, does everyone need to get their decadal Tdap booster, since you could get sick and spread the disease to someone who is not vaccinated. Do we need to require it for someone to show up for work?
Do we need to encourage employers to mandate the flu vaccine yearly?
While the tweet is ripe for ridicule, I think the “externality” argument (which Murphy is implicitly attacking) that many people use for many restrictions are much less effective when almost everyone can get a highly effective vaccine (and would be moot if it were 100% safe and effective).
Of course, maybe he’s just trolling people with a critique of a straw man argument?
A leftist’s world-view includes the belief that someone individual’s actions are determined in part by the society and the group they find themselves in. So, when thinking about an individual, a left-leaning author could think about which traits of their group (“economists”) combine with the specific individual’s traits to lead to the observed behaviour. I wonder why you reject that?
I’d definitely infer something about a population from a tail-end sample. Obviously I’d not treat it like an average, but I’d probably learn something about the spread.
It’s rather surprising how often people don’t actually understand what’s being said to them. I have to train people for my job and when I try to explain something, they nod along and say yes but then when they have to do it, it becomes clear that they heard one thing and then glazed over for the rest.
I’m not sure if this is more curiosity (caring about understanding), confidence (I don’t understand but I’m too insecure to say it), intelligence (I don’t understand that there is anything more to understand here than what I already know), or something else. I view the dismissiveness as a coping strategy for a lack of understanding.
Da:
In Murphy’s case, maybe it’s not so much a lack of understanding as a desire to avoid understanding, as that could diminish the purity of his feeling. But to me it seems irresponsible in that he’s stoking the echo chamber or whatever we should call it. As the commenter above says, Murphy “could also be wrong on purpose, e.g. advancing a particular economic/political agenda,” in which case he could view it as a resounding success that lots of his commenters agree with him even when he’s making a transparently ridiculous argument.
Da:
I think you’re on to something with the coping strategy. I recall when I was a teen when I’d encounter a challenging idea, the tension I experienced from struggling to comprehend was very painful to me. Unwilling to confront or persevere with the mental tension, I would resort to a coping strategy.
I get annoyed when people hum and nod in understanding when they haven’t actually understood. I had to break that habit myself. Interestingly, whenever I’ve found myself in a situation like that, where fear tempted me to withhold the truth from others, if I chose truth I would be rewarded with insight and a deeper understanding of some topic.
This dude’s argument is stupid on the face of it. Hospitals full of COVID patients can’t treat car accident victims, or people with heart attacks, or a million other conditions that are 100% survivable.
The biggest stupid right now is that under 12 children can’t get vaxxed (and the slightest whiff of Bayesian Decision Theory says they should approve that stat!).
Anyway. I hate Twitter but I agree it’s not an echo chamber, it’s basically a vaccination clinic against logical thought.
Sometimes fun to make a contrarian argument with a lot of holes in it simply to heighten the illogic of the initial thesis. Some of the best humor exposes truth in exactly this manner, unencumbered by a lot of equivocation. Of course, that’s not likely to be what this tweeter is doing.
I would argue that two diametrically opposed viewpoints “non”engaging on Twitter IS EXACTLY an echo chamber. First, precise polar opposites imply their contrapuntal: they contain the same information, just oppositely presented. More importantly, trolls exist merely to opine and outrage. Nothing justifies a troll so much as outraging the opposition. “Owning the libs” requires liberal outrage. So those responses are just as confirmatory as the “you go girl” comments, and smirkingly more empowering.
Fully agree that these sort of exchanges are now what constitutes debate: two people yelling at each other from opposite ends of a seesaw, neither listening to the other, nor condescending to the legitimacy of any part of the other view, which I acknowledge is often impossible anyway because the views offered are generally not deserving of proffered legitimacy, framed as they are. Hard to make progress intellectually when this is the backdrop.
I think, in a lot of cases, “debate me” / “change my mind” posts are rhetorical performance, so the opposing arguments are essentially irrelevant to the poster’s communicative intent – see the top definition of “non-debate” on Urban Dictionary, very similar to your take!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=non-debate
“A non-debate is where a controversial topic generates discussion, but neither side debates with each other in any meaningful way, instead choosing to remain in “camps” on either side of the non-debate, where they will validate each others views.
When they enter the non-debate, they will discuss things not to have their minds change, or to change others minds, they will only discuss to reinforce their own beliefs, since the “opposition” is an inferior mind with inferior views. This leads to both camps becoming echo chambers that exist off of each other, and will continue to grow until both echo chambers have been disassembled, and dismantled.”
1. Most internet debate (and all Twitter debate) is not an attempt to debate; it’s an opportunity to be clever. Sometimes it actually is clever… other times not so much. By Sturgeon’s Law, only about 10 percent of attempted clever things are clever.
2. Murphy is not wrong, just, as you point out, not helpful. If a vaccine were 100% safe and effective, then everyone could take it. While you are correct that by not taking the vaccine you could spread it to others who chose not to take a 100% safe and effective vaccine, that would be (by an economist’s revealed preference argument) a risk they had already chosen to take. (The risk would of course be higher, but I assume Murphy is talking about equilibrium, like all economists do.) So there’s an economist’s joke (and not a good one) at work here: if everyone understands all the risks and assumes their actions don’t affect anyone else, then in equilibrium their actions have no effect. This is a real failing of economic equilibrium thinking, but it’s the mode we were all taught.
3. Since the predicate clause is manifestly not true, and indeed couldn’t be true (as you point out, there is nothing in this world that is 100% safe and effective) as a logical debating point is is irrelevant. If a, then b, combined with not a, simple means you can’t conclude anything about b. That’s not much of an argument. But it is also true that If pigs can fly on their own power at 90 percent of the speed of light, then I am both the Pope and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. True statement.
Ah, the wonders of material implication! It’s like the perfect hack for stupid debates: how to be technically correct without actually asserting anything. If this argument is serious, then the economist in question is a Nobel laureate.
To make a silly counterpoint, I do think material implication is not the right way to interpret the “if” statement here. The economist didn’t say “if vaccines *are* 100% safe effective…”; he said “if they *were* 100% safe and effective…” That sort of counterfactual statement should be interpreted modally, as the truth of a statement in a different world where what he’s proposing as the antecedent *is* true. (And since it doesn’t seem reasonable to say that it is, strictly speaking, a logical impossibility that something would be 100% safe and effective, I think that’s reasonably coherent.)
Scientists make these sorts of claims all the time: Would the earth’s tides decrease if the moon suddenly disappeared? Would Louis XIV have benefitted from Ivermectin? (He is thought to have hosted an impressive range of intestinal parasites at Versailles in addition to the human parasites: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.316.7143.1477h) It seems equally, if not more impossible (whatever that means), to make the moon disappear without a trace or to give the Sun King horse dewormer as it is to make a vaccine that is 100% safe and effective. But both of the counterfactuals I just expressed have meaningful answers, rather than being vacuously true just because the antecedent is impossible.
Sure.
But the *scientific* problem is that the impossible counterfactual, even meant modally, has no *logical* refutation. So the discussion of lunar-absence tides and Ivermectin-endowed French kings is nothing more than the application of a theoretic model with input variables changed, without any way to vet the relevant space of the model in the actual world.
Jonathan –
> 1. Most internet debate (and all Twitter debate) is not an attempt to debate; it’s an opportunity to be clever.
I think it’s that, but also some more. It’s usually a futile and endlessly recursive attempt to win an ideological battle with someone who has an opposing ideology. I’ve been thinking about the dynamic where people (including myself sometimes?) spend so much time compulsively making inane and bad faith arguments seemingly motivated primarily by applause from those like-minded, only to inspire insults or reflective bad faith and inane arguments from those who ideologically disagree.
What explains why someone who, I would assume, is capable of sound reasoning would make such an obviously dumb as shit argument as what Andrew highlighted in this post? And my guess is that he’s engaged in similar behaviors quite a bit.
One aspect is learning by trotting out arguments and reading opposing views… Even if we don’t see that directly it presumably happens sometimes beneath the surface.
Surely there’s an addictive dopamine explanation, but what underlies that physiological mechanism?
Good question.
Sameera –
If you follow the links, Yeadon certainly doesn’t come off very well:
https://quillette.com/2021/07/28/vaccines-and-the-coronavirus-crank-crisis/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
I think the extent of mistrust of science and medical experts has increased over the last 40 years. Certainly with the burgeoning of the Evidence Based movement. So subsets are looking to alternate science and medicine. So I’m suggesting, perhaps, that the crises of trust are bigger than Michael Yaedon. Not sure its future.
> someone who, I would assume, is capable of sound reasoning
Why would you assume that? In my experience, only a small percentage of people are capable of sound reasoning. Many others manage to come to the correct conclusion, but it isn’t due to sound reasoning.
Most people don’t think conceptually. This is hard to believe for those of us who do. If you major in math in school, then almost everyone you know thinks conceptually, so you may assume everyone does. But, that is not a random sample.
Here is a quote from an interview with Leslie Lamport:
Interviewer: Is LaTeX hard to use?
Lamport: It’s easy to use—if you’re one of the 2% of the population who thinks logically and can read an instruction manual. The other 98% of the population would find it very hard or impossible to use.
David –
> Why would you assume that?
In my experience, a lot of people are capable of sound reasoning. Where many (if not most) fail is generally a function of context, and the biasing factors in association with specific contexta.
For example, an economist might be able to demonstrate the capability of applying conditional probability when discussing equilibrium in demand and supply curves, or what would happen to the Lakers’ record if LeBron sustains an injury, whereas that capability breaks down when they’re evaluating issues where their identity-orientation comes into play, like COVID.
I’d guess very few economists are completely incapable of sound reasoning across all contexts. For all of its faults, I’d say academia does for the most part weed out people who are completely incapable of any sound reasoning at all.
I don’t have proof outside of anecdotal experience. I’d be interested in evidence that demonstrates otherwise.
People who do not think conceptually can still think. Don’t assume that they are thinking conceptually just because you would think conceptually if presented with the same problem.
That’s not a very charitable interpratation of the tweet. It’s a tweet not a blog post so you need to be charitable.
And what this person was arguing wasn’t that it would make a choice not to take the vaccine consequence free. Rather, the fairly reasonable point being made was that if everyone who wanted to in the US could easily make themselves completely immune to Covid for no cost there would be no moral authority to demand others do so as well (as they would be only deciding to impose a risk in those who have choosen to bear it).
Of course, there are ppl who can’t tolerate a vaccine and the rest of the world but (sadly) I doubt we would find those considerations compelling if it wasn’t that the vaccine isn’t completely effective.
And of course it isn’t. If the vaccine was perfect we wouldn’t really have anything to worry about.
I think you take yourself to be arguing against something else than the obviously true fact that in fact the vaccine isn’t perfect.
But I think it’s important to interpret ppl to say just what they claimed and wait to block the conclusion you disagree with until they make the fallacious move (and noting that we are primarily still worried about ppl who don’t take the vaccine bc it does impose risk on those of us who chose to get vaccinated isn’t it yet).
Peter:
1. I don’t understand why I need to be extra charitable just because something’s a tweet.
2 You write, “I think you take yourself to be arguing against something else than the obviously true fact that in fact the vaccine isn’t perfect.” Indeed, take a look at what I wrote at the beginning of my above post: “As Delaney points out, this [twitter claim] is ridiculous for many reasons, first that nothing in life is 100% safe or 100% effective, second that if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to not take it would definitely have an effect. By not taking the vaccine, you can spread the disease to other people who don’t have the vaccine. This could kill them!” Of course I don’t think the vaccine is 100% safe and effective. Nobody has ever claimed this. But even if the vaccine were 100% safe and effective, we’d still have something to worry about, because lots of people have not taken the vaccine. The whole thing is just silly. I think Len’s, Jonathan’s, Joshua’s comments above capture the dynamic.
Peter –
> if everyone who wanted to in the US could easily make themselves completely immune to Covid for no cost there would be no moral authority to demand others do so as well (as they would be only deciding to impose a risk in those who have choosen to bear it).
Surely you’d agree that accounting for the cost of care to society (financial cost as well as human resources cost) for people sickened as the result of not taking a perfectly effective vaccine would be a moral imperative?
As mentioned by Victor below, the concept of externalities is fundamental to economics – and just completely obvious logic.
I disagree very strongly. I think that the argument is unreasonable, and can only be made correct by an absurd set of rhetorical gymnastics.
Assume that the vaccine is 100% effective, and 100% safe. There are still people who don’t have access to it (another strong assumption, not stated, but lets give it, charitably). There is still a large cost to healthcare systems – now you may argue some business about this being priced in to healthcare, but this involves a further set of assumptions about how healthcare costs are set. There are still costs to me, if e.g. I know some person C who decides for themselves not to get a vaccine, but who I care about and may be at risk by not getting the vaccine. There are still possibilities of mutations which render a previously 100% effective vaccine to be no-longer 100% effective – okay you can build this into your definition of “effective” above, but I think this falls into the category of absurd rhetorical gymnastics. There are also costs associated even if the vaccine really *is* 100% safe and effective but you aren’t *100% sure* that it is both *exactly 100% safe and 100% effective* (costs of producing masks, costs of extra hand washing, costs of doctors worrying that they bring it home to loved ones, costs of people not participating in activities they might otherwise), which is yet another absurd assumption that needs to be built in to make this argument work. Note that this is not even “admitting that its not 100% safe and effective” this is “admitting that we are not 100% sure it is 100% and 100% effective”.
I agree it’s good to try to steel man other people’s arguments and interpret them charitably. But I think this is just a poor argument. In the counterfactual scenario where some deity figure that we all believed and trusted told us the vaccine is certainly 100% safe, and will continue to be against all variants, and made it available to everyone, and the pricing for covid related healthcare was correctly set in a way which we deemed to be perfectly optimal, and where one set of people’s beliefs and actions was unable to influence other people’s beliefs and actions, and where those we loved and cared about took decisions that we believed to be correct (despite the fact we don’t influence them at all) or where we don’t love or care about anyone. Then perhaps the argument is correct? But this soldier seems to be wearing way too much steel to walk anywhere.
The decision to not take vaccine has negative externalities by increasing risk for other people. Economics of externalities is at the core of public economics — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_economics. Public economics studies the role of government interventions, such as taxation and other means, in achieving socially optimal outcomes (maximizing the social welfare), precisely when the negative externalities from individual behavior lead to equilibria that are not maximizing the social welfare. The “economics tweet” is quite shocking actually, because it ignores the very basic, foundational ideas of economics.
Victor:
I agree. Economics is all about tradeoffs, which is, or should be, the opposite of absolutist statements of the form, “Everybody should do X.”
But economists violate this principle in virtually every introductory textbook in print (and one reason why I detested teaching principles and stopped doing so). One of the first tools economics students are taught is the production possibilities frontier – this shows the range of outputs that an economy is capable of producing, given its resources and technologies. Points inside the frontier are labelled “inefficient” with the implication that more of all goods could be obtained without sacrificing any outputs. I always found that fundamentally wrong – indeed, I can think of no examples of such a point. Every potential change involves giving up something – the tradeoffs you allude to – yet the production possibility frontier appears to promise a “free lunch.” And, I don’t think this example is at all trivial – it is a setup for what is to come in the introductory economics course. A litany of government-created inefficiencies (e.g. rent control, agricultural subsidies, zoning, catalytic converters, etc.) follow in most texts. All of these “inefficient” policies are demonstrated, often resulting in students “educated” to view government policies with great skepticism.
I would be remiss to bash such skepticism – it is often justified. And, many of the government policies are, in fact, poor policies and other policies appear (to me, at least) to be superior. However, none of those alternative policies can be enacted costlessly. There are always tradeoffs. But many economists deny these tradeoffs exist, while at the same time highlighting their preferred tradeoff examples (such as the costs of vaccine mandates, etc.).
It’s sad to read it’s still this way. I remember when I took introductory Econ in the 1980s the two main messages were:
1. There is no free lunch.
2. Except, yes there is! (Eliminate a “deadweight loss.”)
I am not sure if intro economics texts exclude the discussion of basic public economics. For example, the Pigovian tax– a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities, is discussed in Acemoglu, Laibson, List, a prominent 101 text. The Pigovian taxes are often used in public debates: for example, in recent discussions of global warming, John Cochrane was proposing in his blog a carbon tax (a Pigovian tax) to deal with increasing CO_2 emissions. Perhaps there is also a clean economic solution regarding vaccinations as well.
P.S. I think the “tradeoff” refers to the movement along the production frontier (along the frontier, producing more of one good reduces the production of another good, that is, there is no “free lunch” on the efficient frontier).
I think it’s a foreground-background problem, compounded by earlier-later dynamics. Econ 101 texts (except mine!) foreground an invisible hand interpretation of markets: supply is assumed to reflect marginal costs to society and demand marginal benefits. Markets are presented as brilliant cost-benefit machines, and applications (like the old standby, rent control) are offered to illustrate the idea. That’s the foreground. Then the book says, well, sometimes it isn’t quite like this, and you get a chapter on externalities and public goods. The partial demurrals don’t erase the vividness of the main message, however. On top of this, the qualifications are presented later in the text, and many courses never get to them, or they are rushed in the sprint to the final exam.
On top of this, there is a partial selection effect at work. Back in the 1930s, the econ profession selected for socially concerned people who wanted to combat the Great Depression. By the 1960s and 70s it selected for people with an attraction to the idea that individual self-interest is the foundation of a free and prosperous society. Not saying all economists are like this — obviously not — but in almost every econ department there are at least some who fit this description. Murphy seems like a case in point.
FWIW, I made a decision when writing my micro text to introduce a prisoner’s dilemma payoff matrix *before* a supply and demand diagram no matter what. It probably complicated the pedagogical approach (and I’m sure it didn’t help sales, which were “not statistically distinguishable from zero”), but I just didn’t want to fall into the usual foregrounding.
I like the speculation about zero cost at equilibrium: not only does individual i’s choice not to vaccinate not harm anyone else (all vaccinated), it doesn’t harm i either (no one to get infected by). Reminds me of the conservation of utility principle Mirowski identified in More Heat than Light. But I don’t think this is what Murphy was getting at, since economists are usually quite clear when they are speaking from equilibrium. (Like Tyler Cowen’s “solve for the equilibrium” stuff.) In other words, Murphy’s problem shouldn’t be subsumed under the more general problem of equilibrium analysis.
I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Murphy seems to be in an own-the-libs world, where the point of an argument is to show how bankrupt liberals are. That makes his tribe very happy, and he’s especially happy to have contributed to it. By lib in this case, I suspect his target is someone who has chosen to get vaccinated and is morally outraged at those who don’t. His point is that, if vaccination were so wonderful, you and all the other libs wouldn’t have any case at all, so see, I’ve caught you in a contradiction. The argument makes emotional sense; I’ve seen some version of it repeatedly coming from anti-vaxxers. Murphy’s problem is that he tried to put it into the form of a model. In doing that he revealed what a vacuous argument it actually is (that’s what models are for), but the emotional “truth” for someone like him is untouched.
On a broader front, I think the non-debate debate is as old as as the hills, but modern technology enables it to take place more visibly than ever, as the unanswered arguments sit beside each other on the same screen. There are lots of reasons for it: tribal reasoning, inability to shift attention from crafting one’s own argument to stepping outside and really listening to someone else’s, cognitive dissonance, social incentives to remain rigid (overlaps tribalism), and others I’m not thinking of right now.
Peter:
Yeah what’s weird is that nobody (“libs” or anyone else) is saying the vaccine is 100% effective! The numbers that we’ve seen are in the 90% range, and that was before new variants. Indeed, back when the vaccines were being developed and tested, it was said that it would be good news if the vaccine was at least 70% effective.
Beyond larger problems of partisanship and echo chambers, I feel that one problem with Murphy’s line of thinking is that it is deterministic and individualistic. Vaccines serve two purposes: to protect individuals and to slow the spread of the disease. These are different, in the same way that individual medicine is not the same as public health.
Am I the only one who doesn’t think the tweet is particularly stupid, at least relative to tweets? I mean treat it as a thought experiment with a particular result, and then treat reality as a small perturbation to the though experiment. Sure, the vaccine is not 100% effective. But would his thought experiment be (almost) true if the vaccine were only 99.9999% effective? What about 99% effective?
The argument that corona is now almost only dangerous(*) to the nonvaccinated is more or less true. But I still see people act like they are at in particular danger from catching it, or that the unvaccinated suddenly have an obligation to the health care system (in a way smokers do not). It is a perfectly valid question to ask how such a person would act if the vaccine were 100% effective. I also see people angry at the nonvaccinated because they got vaccinated, as if the vaccinated had taken some sort of sacrifice for the community by getting vaccinated. But if the vaccine is 100% safe, where is the sacrifice? Sure, the vaccine is not 100% safe, but if you think you sacrificed something significant by getting the vaccine, implicitly you don’t believe that getting the vaccine is nothing to worry about in terms of safety.
(*) At a level beyond the flu.
Matty:
You say, “I also see people angry at the nonvaccinated because they got vaccinated, as if the vaccinated had taken some sort of sacrifice for the community by getting vaccinated.” I think people are getting angry at the nonvaccinated because refusing vaccination can spread the disease. I don’t think anyone is claiming that getting vaccinated is a sacrifice. Quite the opposite: getting vaccinated is a good thing for the individual as well as the community. Also, there’s anger at people who are trying to talk other people out of getting vaccinated, both for the individual effects (non-vaccinated people getting sick) and the population effects (non-vaccinated people spreading the disease). I have not heard of any proponents of vaccination describing getting a vaccine as a sacrifice or anything like that!
Where I live, the hospital is jammed with Covid-19 patients, and the medical people are largely exhausted. This is not a good situation for them, or for people who get sick with other things. The same is true in many places. Infectious disease is inherently a social problem; it is not just about individuals.
Just to add a bit of nuance to the discussion about economists, note that the Twitter guy refers to himself as an “Austrian economist” in his bio. It should be noted that very few economists have ever accepted the Austrian school of economics, and that number has diminished rapidly over time. And for whatever reason, people in the Austrian school (especially on the Internet since that’s mostly their only remaining platform) have a well-deserved reputation of being shallow contrarians, even within economics. The stupid Tweet is very consistent with the heterodox posturing of a shallow contrarian, and is exactly what you’d expect from someone on the Internet calling themselves as “Austrian economist.”
sounds about right
…well, this blog thread is so disjointed that a gratuitous slam of Austrian Economics fits right in the wandering flow.
(BTW how did that obviously shallow Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek win the 1974 Sveriges Riksbank Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences ?)
“Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek” ?
There’s Austrian school and Austrian nationality, oui? The “gratuitous slam” is about the former, but Hayek is the later, no? Which doesn’t make it any less gratuitous, just not about Hayek.
I think it’s called the Austrian school (and Austrian economics) because both Hayek and von Mises were born in Austria.
As something of an “Austrian economist” – I read Hayek – I can say that the Murphy tweet has nothing to do with Hayek. For all I know, Hayek would have had no problem with vaccination. Will might be right though – the tweet might be characteristic of those who choose to call themselves “Austrian economists” on the internet.
Matty –
> But would his thought experiment be (almost) true if the vaccine were only 99.9999% effective? What about 99% effective?
Neither.
Looking at the tweet you’re defending:
If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else.
This is clearly not true. If someone who doesn’t get vaccinated is more likely to get sick, it has an effect on many other people. Even if a vaccine completely protects a person from getting infected, the non-vaccinated person getting sick has a social cost that becomes quite significant at the population level.
I”m trying to figure out what your view might be that disagrees with that conclusion. Maybe you can help me to understand. Here’s what I speculate might be your thinking.
1) It’s the job of doctors and nurses to take care of ill people. So if more people get sick, then any pressure on them to handle the sickness is entirely acceptable. They don’t have to choose that job.
But then what about resources becoming over-taxed – to the point where there is “opportunity cost” in terms of taking care of other people who are sick for other reasons? Perhaps your answer might be:
1a) everyone makes choices that increase or decrease their likelihood of getting ill, so why should this be a special situation?
And what about the cost to society from increased expenditures on healthcare – particularly for people who don’t have insurance? Would you answer to that essentially be 1a again?
As for this part of the tweet:
> So if people refusing a vaccine bother you, it’s only because you admit it’s not completely safe and/or effective.
I can’t think of any reasonable defense for that part. What’s the point of the word choice of”admit” there? Seems to me that the implication is the only reason that I’m “bothered” by people refusing to get vaccinated is because I have a problem “admitting” the vaccines aren’t 100% effective. Because I have some ideological investment in them being 100% effective and so I”m displacing an identity threat. Well, that’s not true. I”m “bothered” by people choosing to not vax for other reasons.
> The argument that corona is now almost only dangerous(*) to the nonvaccinated is more or less true. But I still see people act like they are at in particular danger from catching it, or that the unvaccinated suddenly have an obligation to the health care system (in a way smokers do not).
Yah, it’s not entirely unreasonable to say if I think people choosing to not get vaccinated are failing to live up to an obligation, I should apply the same logic to smokers, or people who engage in other risky health behaviors. It’s worth some thought and I’ll think about it. My first reaction is that someone choosing to not get vaccinated is avoiding an obligation in a more explicit manner. Further, I think most people who are choosing to not get vaxed are doing that for ideological/political reasons. Not so much for something like smoking. That feels different to me. But maybe that’s a fairly tenuous distinction.
“OK, that’s about it for me on this one. I don’t know how to think about this, but I think that my naive earlier view that people were in echo chambers . . . that story ain’t quite right.”
Lacour pointed this out years ago!
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2110621
When I read papers, I read them under the assumption that the data is not fraudulent.
I cannot extend this basic courtesy to LaCour’s papers.
Maybe it is unfair, but attention is a scarce resource.
In case you do not know what I’m referring to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_contact_changes_minds
Fred:
Oh, I hadn’t followed the link! I thought he was referring to Bruno Lacour!
Fred–yes, that was the joke.
By the way, he made this one up too. One way to see that is that “his” “method” classifies all the news shows’ ideology correctly, except the Thom Hartmann show is wildly off–presumably because he did not know or forgot that Thom Hartmann was a liberal.
Is it possible that the quote is a typo and nothing more?
I.E If a vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to *not* take it would have no effect whatsoever on anybody else *who has taken it*. Hilarious if it were the case.
“As Delaney points out, this is ridiculous for many reasons, first that nothing in life is 100% safe or 100% effective, second that if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, then somebody’s decision to not take it would definitely have an effect. By not taking the vaccine, you can spread the disease to other people who don’t have the vaccine. This could kill them!”
I think he *did* think it through, using the sort of reasoning that is unfortunately common among economists.
A. Economists commonly make assumptions of 100% efficacy when such assumptions are plainly ridiculous in any practical situation. They assume “zero transaction costs” or “perfect elasticity” and many other similar evident absurdities. They erect a model in which such assumptions play a fundamental role and ignore issues of stability/robustness and forget that the domains of applicability of their supposed theories violate such assumptions, sometimes very badly.
B. In the mind of too many economists, in the world of 100% vaccine safety and efficacy it is also self-evidently costless to get vaccinated (he simply forgot to state this because to him it is so obvious) so somebody’s decision not to take the vaccine has no effect on others because those others can choose to be protected if they like, so the third party’s decision not to do so reflects assigning utility to not getting vaccinated.
I’m a huge fan of this blog. Thank you for the effort you put into it, I’ve learned a lot from it. (I’m a cultural historian, by the way.)
Anyway, I don’t know if this is relevant, but the date on the original tweet under discussion is April 1.
My guess is both sides of the nondebate debate are trying to prove their loyalty. I would guess that the anti-vax person had plans to show that tweet to members of their same political party, which remains a (mostly) viable political force. I imagine people were going to cut the other way for the other side of that issue. It reminds me of the logic of fads by Bikhchandani et. al. 1992. I would say the quintessential example of that is the Facebook group of Jeopardy! winners who refused to believe the guy who held up three fingers wasn’t a white supremacist. Once a fad gets going (or a political action becomes a norm) it’s hard to undo. Much like a clique wearing fashion that gets them kicked out of some spaces (Goths in high end restaurants) rather than working for “broader societal norms.” It reminds me of why the most authoritarian regimes always create state religions.
If you had a vaccine that is reasonably safe and effective, you could eradicate Polio.
A person’s decision to not take the vaccine, especially if they are part of a group, would prevent reaching that goal, and it would mean that future generations need to keep being vaccinated against it.
That would bother me, my children, and my grandchildren.
Is it a stereotype that a certain type of person routinely fails to see the social implications of their choices because they are focused on the individual?
Here is an effect:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/idaho-enacts-crisis-hospital-care-standards-amid-covid-79872485
Thanks so much for that analysis of echo chambers! I hadn’t thought about it in that way before. I think it all makes a lot of sense, psychologically. Maybe something like, some people get stuck in a pattern where debate is necessary to keep the flames of their beliefs stoked.
How you feelin bout it now simply a year later when the truth is coming out, blogger man?
Anon:
Huh? You’ll have to explain what you’re trying to say here.