In a post early in the Covid saga, we drew attention to the potential parallels with the Stamford Prison experiment, a true story of a psychological experiment that went badly wrong. Every day the parallels get stronger as the equivalent of the Prison guards get ever more zealous and puritanical and the prisoners get ever more subjugated. How otherwise to explain the extra-ordinary scenes in Victoria Australia, where the state police have effectively imposed a curfew and have been filmed choking and wrestling to the ground defenceless young women for nothing more than not wearing a mask?
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
On a more anecdotal note, it’s been noted on many occasions that if you give someone a high visibility jacket and tell them to start ordering people around, then that is exactly what happens. With little more authority than a bit of fluorescent cloth, the newly anointed ‘official’ starts to exceed their authority and more often than not enjoys it. It appeals to the human desire for status and it is fed by the curious behaviour of deferral to the authority figure, even if it is grudging.
In markets we often observe this as ‘moral hazard’ where the equivalent of the high viz jacket is some form of regulator, who more often than not is actually insufficiently qualified but is nevertheless deemed to be so on account of their new position of authority. The quid quo pro for deferring to said official is the abdication of individual responsibility, something that the psychologists refer to as ‘learned helplessness’, as in “It wasn’t my fault the bonds defaulted, the regulator/rating agent/man in charge said they were low risk!”
It is therefore this natural behaviour rather than some grand conspiracy that explains much of the self harm being done across western economies by insufficiently qualified politicians and bureaucrats being given the equivalent of the high viz jacket.
In the early days the idea seems to have been to simply copy the guy next door. A fascinating paper from the Sweden on the behaviour of OECD countries has shown that initial policy measures were highly correlated and had little to do with the actual data – essentially in Europe, everyone (especially the UK) apparently simply followed France.
“We found that the decisions were not based on, or had a very weak correlation to, standard epidemiological indicators such as number of infections, number of deaths, intensive care capacity etc.”
“A much stronger determinant was whether many neighbouring countries had already implemented measures.”
Professor Karl Wennberg, from the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linkoping University,
But that looks no longer to be the case. Even though there are increasing numbers of independent data scientists and analysts breaking the data down into useful information sets, in the UK at least policy decisions seem to be being made by focus group looking at simplistic, single number variables and are thus flipping around constantly. It’s the equivalent of clueless modern parents asking their children to decide what the family is going to have for supper.
There are other agendas of course. In Hong Kong the fact that the dramatic second lockdown on account of a minor tick up in cases was followed up by the postponement of the, likely tricky, September elections is probably not a coincidence, while in the US the fact that the reluctance to lift lockdown and prolong the feelings of negativity seems particularly concentrated in states where the leadership are Democrat is likely not a coincidence either. The fact that the so called ‘spike’ in cases in places such as Florida and Texas turned out to be more to do with reporting and testing but was used by Democrat Governors as an excuse to cancel Republican conventions highlights the extent to which Covid has now been co-opted by political actors. Elsewhere it is notable that New Zealand has also postponed elections with not even a hint of the hysteria that greeted Donald Trump even raising the prospect.
In the UK, where there are no elections but where avoiding blame for anything at all seems to be the major motivating force, the data is being similarly (ab)used, in this case to justify previous actions. Recently it was revealed that anyone dying from anything at all who had at any time tested positive for Covid was classed as a Covid death. Adjustments to this practice (limiting the time period to 28 days from a positive test) subsequently reduced July ‘Covid Deaths’ from over 2000 to around 500, which rather put a dent in the ‘deadly second wave’ narrative being promoted to show that the earlier lockdown was ‘if anything not tough enough’. This is the sunk cost fallacy at its worst.
Meanwhile, as deaths and ICU admissions fall dramatically everywhere, the deliberate focus on ‘infections’ – in reality cases due to increased testing – which combined with the UK arbitrary cut off point of 20 cases per 100,000 of population has led to the latest round of extreme uncertainty based around quarantine. There is not a single department in France for example where cases exceed the 50 per 100,000 of population that would occasion a local lockdown and yet the UK’s new number of 20 has led to quarantine and a mad dash for the channel last weekend, many of whom will be returning to areas of the UK with local levels higher than France. No wonder that the UK and European markets are struggling with this level of Government originated uncertainty.
We have discussed before about the sinister sounding SPI-B behavioural science sub group at SAGE, whose self appointed mandate now seems to be to keep the UK population permanently fearful and encouraging them to ‘shop’ one another to the authorities if anyone fails to comply to the latest edicts from High Viz land. This is almost certainly behind the U-turn, one of so many, about wearing masks in public; it is a highly visible demonstration of conformism and a powerful method of control – as the appropriately black shirted police force in Victoria demonstrated. It is also supposed to give the illusion of control over the virus and allows individuals to feel that they are ‘doing their bit’. However, the idea that it will encourage people to go back to the shops or back to work seems totally misplaced. Rather than reassuring people it appears to be making people much more afraid. The V shaped recovery may yet come for the gig economy, but the high street and hospitality remain in critical condition.
The table below comes from the SPI-B report on controlling behaviours written back in March. Note 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8, especially as the spill over effects on three of the most prominent options are acknowledged to potentially be negative.
Meanwhile the mask issue has been picked up by another group with an agenda, the progressive (or regressive) left, especially in the US where they are becoming energised for the fight against their arch enemy this November. The Democrats and the virtue signalling left have taken up mask wearing as a sign that ‘they care’ and thus have resurrected much of the social divisions they thrive upon in the wearing of a piece of cloth. It should not have escaped our notice for example that every picture of Joe Biden shows him wearing a mask, while every picture of Donald Trump shows him without one. It is to be hoped at least that whatever the result, post November this aspect will likely stop.
Another group with an agenda of course are the Pharmaceutical companies, who want ‘their turn’ at government largesse, given that the finance guys and the Military Industrial Complex have been feeding for so long. Once people realised that social distancing didn’t seem to matter so long as your protest was in a good cause and moreover that it didn’t actually lead to any increase in hospital admissions or deaths, then the only thing to do was to ramp up the number of cases and declare a second wave that would only be saved by a vaccine from the munificent drug companies. It is no coincidence that the jump in ‘cases’ reported in France – which occasioned the ridiculous quarantine orders by the British government- came after the government changed the testing regime in mid July. Prior to July 25th you had to get a prescription from a doctor and pay for a test. Post that date, you didn’t need a prescription and the test was free. No surprise then that of the 3.5m tests done so far, 2.5m have been done in the last 3 weeks. No surprise either that the infection rate picked up given that so many people are asymptomatic.
Thus in our Stamford Prison experiment we now have the mandate for authoritarianism based upon a new zero tolerance regime for a disease so deadly that you need a test to find out you have it and from which 99.7% of people recover. To demonstrate compliance, you need to wear a face mask designed for anti bacterial use to prevent the spreading of a virus which in one powerful analogy was likened to “trying to stop a mosquito with a chain linked fence”. Logic left the room many months ago and now politics has hijacked much of the agenda. The economy and markets – outside of the Tech sector and China are duly struggling with huge levels of uncertainty. Let’s hope that post the US Election (for that is the key data point now) that this particular version of the Stamford experiment is also brought to an early close.
