The Painful Politics of Tim Harford

This, from Tim Harford in the FT, is interesting. I think Harford is right about why it is interesting, but deeply wrong in other ways. If you can read the link first then I suggest you do; if you can't then don't worry, I'll tell you the story as I go.

Harford, who is a sane guy and an interesting writer, receives an email. It seems that some chap in his 70s had been vaccinated against covid and wanted to know why he couldn't meet his friends inside for coffee. He asks Harford: why not - what's the risk?

I pause here. How does that make you feel? Now read on.

Harford tells us that his correspondent was perfectly polite, yet the email made him "smoulder with rage ... the question sat in my stomach and burned".

Harford says - I think, rightly - that this extreme emotional reaction is the interesting point to consider. Frankly, I find it bizarre. But more about me later: let's get back to Harford.

Harford asks himself why he is so angry. He does a bit of mental arithmetic and says this:

"A vaccinated 70-year-old has roughly the same low risk of death as an unvaccinated 47-year-old. Those numbers may not be exactly right, but for this particular unvaccinated 47-year-old, they were close enough to trigger a severe emotional reaction. I have not been hanging out with my 47-year-old friends — and that is not because I fear death. It’s to prevent the virus from spreading, and thus protect the people who are most vulnerable. So it has been for all of us, on and off, for a year. And let’s not even talk about our fraying-under-the-strain children, vastly less at risk of Covid-19 complications than any 70-year-old will ever be, no matter how well vaccinated. That was why I smouldered. We have all been making extraordinary sacrifices to protect vulnerable people, and here was one of these people, suddenly feeling invulnerable (but, actually, no more invulnerable than I), complaining that his freedom had not instantly been restored."

Now, as it happens, I think Harford takes a wrong turn here. The question that matters is not whether vaccinated people are themselves at risk of dying from covid but rather whether they can pass it on to others while not themselves being affected. That is (at least in part) why schools have been closed: not to protect the children themselves, but in case the children pass covid on to vulnerable adults. As I understand it, the indications so far are that vaccination is pretty effective at preventing the disease spreading in this way, but of course I defer to the scientists for the final view.

But that's not the interesting thing. What is interesting is that Harford's reaction to some old chap asking whether he can safely have coffee with his friends was unreasoning rage and vituperation expressed in fiery terms ("smouldering", "burning"). I quoted him at length above so you can see that I am not misrepresenting him when I say that it boils down to this: Why can't I see my friends? What about me? 

That strikes me as an odd reaction. I would be embarrassed to be such a dog in the manger in public. 

But then I wondered: perhaps I am the odd one. Certainly Harford does not think he is alone. He writes: "It’s not just me who whines about unfairness. Ponder the reaction to the UK’s geographical tier system of late 2020. In principle, it made sense: places with high infection rates were restricted for their own good; those with low infection rates did not need such restrictions. But most people instead saw regional tiers as punishments, invidious and arbitrary. National lockdown, for all its costs and its discontents, has never been seen that way."

As I say, Harford is a reasonable person. I'm sure that he has good reason for saying that "most people" resented the regional tiers as invidious and arbitrary, and that most people "whine ... about unfairness" in that way. 

All of which leads me to conclude that indeed I am the odd person here. I thought that having regional measures to deal with regional problems was potentially a sensible idea. One might think that it wouldn't work, or that the boundaries were oddly drawn, or something of that kind, but I never imagined that there was anything intrinsically unfair about the concept. I suppose I never thought that anything might even think that. 

Equally, I find it hard to see why I might get annoyed about some other people being allowed to go to coffee shops when I can't. Good for you! I think. We will all be able to go to coffee shops soon enough, but in the meantime, I'm glad you get the chance even if I can't yet. Bear in mind that we are not talking about the place of coffee shops in the best policy for preventing the spread of a disease - Harford and I would no doubt agree, after looking at the evidence, what that is - we are just talking about one's immediate emotional reaction to the possibility of a retired person having a cup of tea and a slice of cake with his friends.

Harford talks about fairness. One can see that fairness might be a concern if we needed to share out the coffee shop visits, or each wait our turn. But that's not the case here: that 70 year old having a chat with his friend wouldn't stop anyone from doing anything. Instead, Harford feels an immediate and strong emotional reaction to the idea of someone having something he can't have. Something that costs him nothing, something that deprives no one else of anything and something that helps the economy in some small way for the benefit of all. 

The word for what Harford feels is envy. 

You may recall the old phrase "the politics of envy". It was, so I thought, an unfair attack used by the Right: the charge was that what socialists really wanted, behind their veneer of 'redistribution of wealth', was not good things for the poor but simply to deny good things to the rich. But it seems that it is not such an unfair attack after all. It seems that there is a psychological truth in it: envy really is a motivating factor in political opinions. 

Harford's piece makes this clear. "Will we give vaccinated people more freedoms than others? That is what is happening in Israel. And there is something to be said for that, both as an incentive to get vaccinated, and to combine the maximum reopening with the minimum public health risk. It is efficient; the economist in me applauds that. As Deng Xiaoping put it as he liberalised the Chinese economy in the 1980s: “Let some people get rich first.” But not even the Undercover Economist [i.e. Harford] is just an economist. Fairness matters."

It's revealing that Harford moves so quickly from British coffee shops to Communist China. Let's just recall what we are talking about. Deng Xiaoping's reforms are a big deal. What Deng did enabled the people of the most populous country in the world to go from having Indian-level incomes, i.e., incomes at a fraction of the level of, say, Thailand's, to middle-income levels comparable to those of Turkey or Argentina: see graph below. (Look up Turkey or Argentina if you want to check.)

Deng's reforms have a fair claim to be one of the biggest contributions to net human welfare in all of recorded history. To be concerned about the fact that they allowed some people to get rich first (or, indeed, to get very rich indeed) is odd. To think that valuing Deng's reforms requires one to swallow one's much-loved scruples about fairness in order to chew on a tasteless-but-worthy diet of efficiency is just plain weird. 

So I think the emotional reaction that Harford describes and considers to be widespread is a mean-spirited impulse. It's not an instinct for fairness - it's envy. We are talking about emotions here, so I need to describe in emotional terms what the alternative view of the world looks like. In short, there are those of us who would no more begrudge a 70-year old a chat with his friends than we begrudge teenagers their youth, or old people their happy memories, or country-dwellers their star-filled night skies, or city-dwellers their short walks to the shops, or country-house owners their Old Masters, or bilingual people their communication skills, or the families of cabin crew their cheap flights or ... I could go on, but you get the picture. There are, to my way of thinking (or rather, to my way of feeling), a lot of lovely and wonderful things in the world. I will get to experience but a few of them: I will never score the winning goal in the World Cup, nor, for all that I live a comfortable life in a rich country, will I have the kind of extreme wealth that is commonly described using expletives. But I'm pleased that other people will get to have those experiences. Is that not a better impulse - a better emotional reaction - than to feel aggrieved that others have what you have not?

I had naively assumed, if I had thought about it at all, that how I feel is how most people feel. I was of course aware that many people were in favour of taxing the rich until the pips squeak, but I had thought that the objection to the lifestyles of the rich - even at a visceral, emotional level - was that it came at the expense of the poor or that it needed to be curtailed in order that the poor could have more. But perhaps not. After all, Harford is not making a point about the money, wealth or income of the 70-year-old, but about his freedoms, and yet he has the same reaction and sees no difference between what he thinks about the man's freedoms and Deng's reforms. 

Perhaps the more prevalent emotion is simply that if I can't have it then no one can. But isn't that a sad way to go through life? Does it not seem petty, illiberal, uncharitable - just plain small - to feel affronted, to smoulder with rage!, at the mere suggestion that someone might have a coffee with a friend?

In this post-liberal era (or whatever you want to call it), emotional and subjective reactions - lived experience, your truth, all the rest of it - are increasingly important. We are asked to be careful of the meaner, nastier emotions associated with the populist Right: distrust of expertise, intolerance of outsiders, racism-sexism-other-isms, and so on. Quite right too. But please bear in mind that the Right does not have a monopoly on mean and grudging instincts: quite apart from the new intolerances and sensitivities of the modern online Left, it seems that good old-fashioned envy is still going strong.