A ≠ A: Amnesty and accountability in public policy

Wave and smile, wave and smile

Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty, argues Emily Oster in a recent piece for The Atlantic:

But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society...Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

The writer proposes - in an knightly fashion - transcending a pointless doom-loop of bitterness, in favor of a renewed collective resolve to tackle the problems covid posed to our society. To be fair, hers is not just a call for legal immunity for policy-makers, as it is also addressed to the public discourse’s ills.

The essay met civilized, but stiff backlash. Michael Brendan Dougherty over at National Review (A ‘Pandemic Amnesty’? Hell, No) raps it from the get-go:

‘Forget everything, learn nothing’ is a bad way to ensure accountability for our institutions.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd (The tyranny of a Covid amnesty) offers a longer essay, interesting as always:

Science is Real [has been] weaponised without compunction, as a bludgeon to enforce a moral consensus that wasn’t scientific, and wasn’t rational.

Words, not swords (at least initially)

While my family and I have been comically compliant to every whimsical government policy against covid, I too tilt to the “wait, what?” side in a prospective “amnesty” (or maybe is it exactly because of this subservience at the first place?). The crisis mode of the say first 3 months can be “excused”. But the post summer’20 landscape was different, with restrictive measures dragging for months and months, without clear rationales, effects and levels of responsibility (bitching about Greece, which made it to the top-tier in terms of stringency in Oct’20-May’21. The US apparently is large and decentralized, so the motifs probably varied wildly, while on average it had a milder policy mix).

Covid policy involved the government, a technocratic public health committee and the EU, but in an increasingly blurry way, that allowed for discretion, faints and backtracks. The judicial system abstained from interfering, thus adding another horcrux to the hands-off “permacrisis” jurisprudence (Courts have tended to concede wide margins of initiative/ assessment/ error to the “democratically elected lawmakers” and their - independent or not - expert appointees¹, at the face of grave circumstances for, eh, state sovereignty - the public debt crisis of 2010 also comes to mind). The EU, from the other hand, has traditionally been used by national governments as a handy scapegoat/ bogeyman for a variety of reasons.

Oster’s argument is plausible (wailing over spilled milk - or in this case collective trauma - is counterproductive, as are fragile egos and mutual accusations), but not entirely persuasive. Efficiency can also be served by transparency and accountability. And as much as I am inclined to accept that “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”, it just feels so convenient to just wave a hand and point forward.

1. An unfortunate merge of politicos with experts. Alexander Zubatov at The American Conservative (Where Higher Education Went Wrong) quoted a relevant - if past - debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann the public, experts, and democracy.