Russell Roberts's Blog, page 105

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 183 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters:

It’s clear that media, politicians, and often the assessment reports themselves blatantly misrepresent what the science says about climate and catastrophes. Those failures indict the scientists who write and too-casually review the reports, the reporters who uncritically repeat them, the editors who allow that to happen, the activists and their organizations who fan the fires of alarm, and the experts whose public silence endorses the deception. The constant repetition of these and many other climate fallacies turns them into accepted “truths.”

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

On Twitter, Matt Ridley approvingly quotes from this essay in the Times by Jonathan Sumption:

“The lockdown was an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime….Throughout history, fear has been the chief instrument of authoritarian rule. During the lockdown it was what enabled the government to silence dissent and inhibit discussion.”

In the Twitter thread on Ridley’s tweet, NJGray tweets:

In France I was for the first lockdown. I regret. We have lost our liberties and it was permanent infantilization and censorship.

Spiked!‘s Fraser Myers writes eloquently on “[l]ockdown and the price of suppressing dissent.” (HT Martin Kulldorff) Two slices:

‘You must stay at home.’ That simple instruction from prime minister Boris Johnson, issued before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, changed the fate of the nation forever.

You might have imagined that in a democratic country such as Britain, a decision of this magnitude would not simply have been imposed by executive fiat. That the shutting down of schools, the economy and society might have been something worth debating and discussing. But for much of the pandemic, lockdown was never subjected to proper scrutiny, even though its harms were obvious from the start.

Indeed, the harms of lockdown are becoming clearer by the day. The near-collapse of the NHS, the crisis in education and runaway inflation can all be traced back, at least in part, to March 2020. And while the Russian invasion of Ukraine has since sparked a global energy crisis, lockdown is part of what left us so vulnerable to its effects.

After all, the lockdown was the biggest shock to the UK economy in the history of industrial capitalism. And in the words of one High Court judge, it was ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’. Many of its awful impacts were predictable and predicted.

But at the time when lockdown was announced, anyone who raised a peep of complaint about this novel and draconian policy was shouted down or shoved aside. Any green shoots of dissent were trampled on. Fears about the economy were denounced as greedy. Fears about liberty were dismissed as selfish. Any and all calls for some relaxation of the rules were condemned as reckless and lethal.

…..

Throughout the pandemic, the government and the scientists tried to hide their uncertainty. The media demonised dissenters and Big Tech cracked down on them. All of this was apparently to the end of showing a unified front, preserving the integrity of science and pushing a singular, easy-to-follow public-health message. We were essentially told that in times of crisis it is better to put up and shut up than to undermine the authorities.

But look where that has got us. An economic crisis, a health-service crisis and an education crisis are now engulfing the nation – all of which were, at least in part, fuelled by lockdown. We are standing in the smouldering wreckage of our elites’ terrible decisions. We have paid a heavy price indeed for suppressing debate and dissent.

Barbara Joanne Watson tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

My mother mourned her brother’s death the rest of her life. A Canadian, he died a month before WWII ended fighting in the US Army. He didn’t die, and my mother didn’t lose her beloved brother, for lockdowns. He died for freedom. Politicians & bureaucrats best remember that.

Phil Magness and Robertas Bakula bust the bizarre myth that ‘neoliberalism’ is today running wild on college campuses. A slice:

What about the faculty ranks? The same higher-education writers tell us that “neoliberalism” prioritizes job-centric disciplines with marketable skills, while devaluing holistic education in the humanities. If this is true, we should expect to see STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and professional degree programs such as business, accounting, and finance dominating the ranks of faculty employment.

The data tell a very different story. Between 1999 and 2015, faculty employment in the humanities grew faster than in most STEM disciplines. The social sciences and fine arts also added faculty to their ranks. Business and engineering showed modest growth by comparison. The natural sciences (with the exception of health sciences, particularly nursing and pre-med programs) briefly spiked in the early 2000s before flatlining about 2004, where they’ve remained ever since. The “devalued” humanities and social sciences have posted continuous growth in their faculty ranks despite the neoliberal poltergeist’s alleged grip. According to a survey of 2015 PhD graduates, recent humanities PhDs accounted for 19 percent of reported academic job commitments. Social science PhDs accounted for 17 percent. Math and computer science trailed at 6 percent, engineering at 5 percent, and physical and earth sciences at 3 percent. The answer to the question of which disciplines employ the most faculty in a typical university is seldom a STEM field—it’s usually the English Department, which enjoys an outsized presence on the mandatory General Education curriculum.

As guest host at EconTalk, Mike Munger talks with guest guest Russ Roberts about the latter’s new book, Wild Problems.

At EconLog, David Henderson shares his Facebook friend Stanley Ridgley’s clever and correct summary of Biden’s student-loan ‘forgiveness’:

Congrats to everyone who didn’t have college debt. Now you do.

Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reports on how environmentalists in California are driving up home prices.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman shares highlights from a new report that “highlights the staggering cost of green ‘delusions.'”

National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford explains that this coming winter is likely to expose ordinary Europeans to the harsh, cold reality of that continent’s irrational embrace of the green religion.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 98 of Edwin Cannan’s December 1916 Economic Journal paper, “The Report on Food Prices,” as this paper is reprinted in the original edition of Cannan’s marvelous 1927 collection, An Economist’s Protest:

The great majority of the newspaper-reading public is always ready to listen to an accusation of scoundrelism against any small minority from whom it happens to buy some commodity: A to Y join cheerfully in slandering Z, without ever thinking that next week it will be Y’s turn to be slandered by A to X, with Z, who has now forgiven his favourite newspaper’s aberration in attacking his trade last week; and so on, with never a thought of the handle given to the hated Socialist. Articles appear explaining that there is no shortage of this, that, and the other commodity and that the rise of price is due solely to the machinations of the “__ Ring.”

DBx: Prices (and wages) not set or obstructed by government reflect underlying economic realities. These realities are often ones made worse by government. Too often – and today no less than in Cannan’s day – people who are unhappy with the messages that are accurately reported by the prices ask that same government to prevent the prices from accurately reflecting those realities.

People who support price controls operate with a dark-ages-like superstition that insists that changing the image or the description of some real phenomenon is sufficient to change the substance or the reality of that phenomenon. Are some workers’ market wages lower than you’ve somehow divined these wages ‘should’ be? No problem! Have the government declare a minimum wage and the wages of all affected workers will miraculously rise to that minimum level! Is the price of gasoline higher than you’ve somehow divined it should be? No problem! Have the government declare a maximum price at which gasoline can be sold and the price of gasoline will miraculously fall to that level!

If we were to encounter a newspaper reporter who insists that the real-world events on which he reports are determined by the words he uses to report them, we’d immediately know that that ‘reporter’ is wholly incompetent to be a reporter. Yet our world swarms with politicians and pundits – and even some people who are credentialed as economists – who act exactly as does such a ‘reporter.’ And these politicians, pundits, and economists are accorded respect and even called “progressive.”

Meaningful Jobs are Productive Jobs – Not Protected Jobs

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to a commenter at EconLog:

Mr. Fosse:

In response to my comment on this EconLog post by Veronique de Rugy you write:

There’s an important point you miss. Free markets could be the greatest for meeting consumer needs but [Oren] Cass understands, which you and deRugy don’t, that free markets these days and unchecked globalization fail at meeting workers needs. The industrial policy which Cass wants is one which would reverse the erosion of meaningful manufacturing jobs.

Well.

Even if industrial policy à la Oren Cass were to “reverse the erosion” of manufacturing jobs, the ‘meaningfulness’ of the jobs that would thus be artificially created would be swamped by these jobs being also parasitic. Workers in those jobs would find “meaning” in them only insofar as these workers remain blind to the reality that their “meaningful” jobs exist only as a result of resources being forcibly extracted from American consumers (through protective tariffs) and from American taxpayers (tapped for the funds paid out as subsidies).

Because decent people want to be net contributors to – rather than parasites on – their fellow citizens, no decent person who is economically knowledgeable would find great ‘meaning’ holding the kind of job that would be created by Oren Cass’s industrial policy.

More generally, you and Oren would do well to take a longer historical perspective. In 1917 the great British economist Edwin Cannan wrote this:

Throughout history increasing knowledge and civilization have enabled mankind to get the raw materials supplied by the surface of the earth for human food and clothing with greater and greater ease, so that a larger proportion of human labour time has been gradually made available for working up that raw material into more refined forms. Labour being divided, the diminution in the proportion of the labour time required for providing the coarsest necessaries of life has naturally meant a diminution in the proportion of the whole population which has to be employed in agriculture, and a setting free of a larger proportion for the supplying of other and more refined wants. Yet when has mankind been without weeping and wailing over “the decay of agriculture”? The greatest sign of human progress has been constantly treated as something to be deplored and, if possible, prevented.*

A century ago people gnashed their teeth over the demise of employment in agriculture – a demise caused largely by improved technology. Those gnashing their teeth back then were blind to the reality that the resulting release of labor allowed the growth of new, more-productive industries and, thus, the creation of new, more-productive, better-paying, and (I dare say) more meaningful employment.

Today, people gnash their teeth over the demise of employment in manufacturing – a demise caused largely by improved technology. Those gnashing their teeth today are blind to the reality that the resulting release of labor allows the growth of new, more-productive industries and, thus, the creation of new, even more-productive, even better-paying, and (I again dare say) more truly meaningful employment.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Edwin Cannan, “The Influence of the War On Commercial Policy,” which is a speech delivered by Cannan on September 22, 1917; the text of this speech appears in Cannan, An Economist’s Protest (London: P.S. King & Son, 1927). The quotation here is on page 123.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board explains the awful economic carnage that the British government’s pursuit of ‘net zero’ carbon emissions is inflicting on the British economy. A slice:

Americans who fancy themselves net-zero climate advocates might want to take a look at Britain for a guide to the future. Household energy bills were expected to rise 40% this autumn, but on Friday the government regulator announced they’ll leap 80% in a single bound.

This boost follows a 54% rise in April and brings the average household’s annual bill to £3,549 ($4,208). The median household income is £31,400, which gives a sense of the growing proportion of each household’s budget that will go toward central heating, cooking and keeping the lights on. For the ruling Tories, this is a political calamity.

And that’s merely what households will spend directly on energy. Britain is also in the grip of an energy-price crisis for businesses, whose rates aren’t subject to a cap. Some small businesses report they can’t get any utility to supply them without paying a steep deposit up front, because energy companies are concerned that high prices will push more small firms into insolvency. Lower-income households in particular will bear the brunt of this as prices for goods and services skyrocket and companies lay off employees.

If you think this couldn’t happen in America, think again. The underlying cause of Britain’s energy misery is its fixation with climate goals, especially the ambition to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. To meet that goal Britain has grown hostile to domestic energy exploration, banning shale-gas fracking and slapping windfall-profits taxes on North Sea oil and gas producers that will deter investment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hurt, but the U.K.’s policies made its citizens vulnerable to such a global shock.

Writing at National Review, GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino reminds enthusiasts for “renewable energy” of facts that they should keep in mind.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Alberto Mingardi remembers the late French historian Jean Baechler. Two slices:

Economic growth, Baechler maintained, is the result of millions of “experiments” by people who act and think differently from the mainstream. For growth to happen, such acts of mutinous innovation must be permissible if not explicitly permitted. Baechler saw capitalism as an offspring of Europe’s peculiar political condition. Despite the attempts of Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler, Europe never became an empire. A great cultural homogeneity, provided mainly by Christianity, failed to produce a Continentwide political order.

…..

Baechler maintained that democracy wasn’t a modern invention but that it was reinvented in another quintessential European institution: the city, a place for trade where the conditions necessary for free and open exchange thrived. Within the walls of the city, tinkerers and lawyers faced problems to solve, whatever the struggles between great powers. Potential solutions emerged and were tested in millions of daily market experiments.

(DBx: I met Baechler in the late 1980s or early 1990s at a conference organized by the late Leonard Liggio. I recall Baechler as being an intense yet charming scholar. Among the works we conferees read was that of Baechler, along with that of the American legal historian Harold Berman and also that of Alan Macfarlane.)

John O. McGinnis explains how a good citizen of a republic thinks.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan will debate Peter Singer.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy has some ideas for reforming government. A slice:

Finally, we should move away from all age-based eligibility criteria, such as the ones used for Social Security and Medicare. Hear me out: Age-based programs made sense when not working due to old age meant being poor (and in fact seniors used to be overrepresented in the lowest income quintile). But no longer. Seniors today disproportionately occupy the top income quintile. So, we should now move all programs to need-based criteria, which would still allow poor seniors to receive benefits.

David Black loves David Duchovny’s new novel, The Reservoir.

Laura Dodsworth reacts to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s revelation that the British government intentionally terrified the British people into an unjustified level of fear of covid. A slice:

The truth is, that at the time, most people did have no idea it was happening. It was relatively easy to manipulate and frighten people into complying with the loss of freedoms. So, could it happen again?

If you concede that a measure like lockdown is acceptable for one crisis, will it be acceptable for another crisis in the future? What about climate change? Or a run on the banks? And if you concede it is justifiable to use nudge and fear-mongering to emotionally kettle the population, will you justify it again?

I’m afraid this government is heavy-handedly using behavioural science and propaganda to soften people up for net zero policies. Boris Johnson promised in October 2021 that we could be greener without a hair shirt in sight. This winter we will be buried under hair shirts, and they’ll be all we have for warmth. Colour-coded weather warnings ritualise observance and anxiety about climate change. Nadhim Zahawi described education as a ‘weapon’ against climate change. And an astonishing report published by the Nudge Unit and broadcaster Sky recommended that TV can be used to nudge us towards carbon net zero, by using news segments, storylines in drama, children’s programming and even product placement. And if you want to question any of this? Well, yesterday’s Covid denier is today’s climate denier.

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Ricochet.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page xiv of George Gilder’s Foreword to Marian Tupy’s and Gale Pooley’s excellent hot-off-the-press 2022 book, Superabundance (which I read in full in typescript form):

Economies prosper to the extent that knowledge, intrinsically dispersed through the system in the minds of individuals, is complemented by a similar dispersal of power. Free markets and uncontrolled prices typically achieve this goal. Combinations of government and business frustrate it.

The Mad Witch Hunting Intensifies

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

I thank Andy Morriss for alerting me to this report in The Times:

Editor:

With a recent parliamentary investigation linking slavery opponent Edmund Burke to slavery through his Caribbean plantation-owning brother, today’s drill of searching out and destroying anyone or anything that can be imagined to have had even the most tenuous connection to that odious institution descends to new depths (“Statue inquiry adds Edmund Burke to parliament slavery list,” August 26).

Where will this mad witch-hunting end? I fear that we who speak European languages will soon be forced, because of the ancient Romans’ custom of holding slaves, to abandon the use of our alphabet.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board praises British MP and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak for “lifting the veil on how Britain went into destructive pandemic lockdowns.” A slice:

“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did. And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place,” the former Chancellor of the Exchequer said in an interview with Britain’s Spectator magazine published this week.

Mr. Sunak trails Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in the race to lead the Conservative Party and replace Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Lockdown skepticism plays well with the Tory rank-and-file who are casting the votes this month. This may be a Hail Mary to revive his campaign, but it has the virtue of being true.

Evolving knowledge about the novel coronavirus and new data about the harm of lockdowns have triggered renewed debate about the quality of the science that led to school closures, business shutdowns and other unprecedented restrictions on personal liberty. Public-health experts have questions to answer about their failures.

Mr. Sunak is raising a separate and equally important question: How and why did elected politicians seem to delegate their policy judgment to public-health officials? Mr. Sunak says one problem was that the scientists misstated what they knew. He says the U.K. government’s main scientific advisory panel went so far as to edit dissenting opinions out of the official minutes of its meetings.

But the ex-Chancellor also points to a failure of elected politicians to ask probing questions and to understand the scientific models they were being fed. This made it impossible for politicians to assess the larger public good beyond incomplete epidemiological estimates when setting policies that we now know were destructive to education, employment and other public-health concerns.

The brave few kept the flag of personal freedom alive. That really is no exaggeration. And they paid heavily for it. On social media the abuse was intense. You don’t care about lives! they snarled. You’re murderers! they claimed. And in the mainstream, things weren’t much better. You’re a “small, disproportionately influential faction,” moaned a Guardian Leader, that “denies the virulence of the virus”. Thanks for that.

One MP, Neil O’Brien, took it upon himself to publicly discredit any sceptic, declaring “they have a hell of a lot to answer for”. No, you do Mr O’Brien, for stifling free debate, along with certain mainstream news outlets for failing over a two-year period to examine whether lockdown might cause more harm than good.

(Yesterday at Cafe Hayek I posted several passages from the Spectator piece mentioned above.)

. A slice:

Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. It’s happened at last. Yes, one of the most senior members of government during that whole lockdown business has finally admitted that the strategy was overdone, badly handled and badly communicated. Take a bow, Rishi Sunak.

I had to do a double take when I saw the reports. For those long lockdown months, nobody in government, let alone the Cabinet, was prepared to say any such thing. It was left to a few courageous journalists and scientists to take on the overwhelming force of the lockdown fanatics, with police fining people for sitting on park benches and neighbours eagerly shopping each other like this was some authoritarian country.

Fraser Nelson, writing in the Telegraph about his interview with Rishi Sunak, says that “[t]he pseudo-scientific sheen is finally being stripped off the decision to shut down Britain.” Two slices:

His speaking out now confirms much of what many suspected. That the culture of fear, seen in the Orwellian advertising campaign that sought to terrify the country, applied inside Government. Questioning lockdown, even in ministerial meetings, was seen as an attack on the Prime Minister’s authority. To ask even basic questions – about how many extra cancer deaths there might be, for example – was to risk being portrayed as one the crackpots, the “Cov-idiots”, people who wanted to “let the virus rip”. Hysteria had taken hold in the heart of Whitehall.

…..

This matters because this point shows how “the science” was, in fact, no such thing. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance began by advising ministers not to lock down, saying public events were fine, and that face masks were pointless. They were talking about herd immunity as the way out. Then they flipped entirely. But this reveals something crucial: lockdown never was backed by science. It was about models and suppositions, educated guesswork. It was driven by moods, emotion, fear – and, worst of all, politics masquerading as science.

And here’s a report in the Telegraph of how science was misused in Britain to justify lockdowns. Two slices:

“During those early meetings of Spi-B, I often found myself a bit of a lone voice,” said Dr [Gavin] Morgan. “This was in early March 2020, when we were meeting several times a week. With the benefit of hindsight, there may have been a bit of groupthink going on in those early meetings. Things were a fait accompli, it had already been decided that school closures were a good thing.”

…..

Privately, scientists said that from “day one”, the Government’s proclamation that it would do “whatever the science tells us” was problematic.

One insider on Sage, who declined to be named, said: “For many of us working on Sage, Boris saying we will follow the science set alarm bells ringing. He was removing himself from responsibility and putting it on us. That shouldn’t have happened.”

Writing in the Washington Times, Pierre Kory rightly criticizes the D.C. government’s mandate that all students above the age of 12 be vaccinated against covid.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The world needs a serious morbidity & mortality conference about lockdowns & covid response. Unlike the 2020-22 debate, it should include all voices without prejudice, and should explicitly consider the role of propaganda and smearing of dissidents.

David Stockman decries the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence.

Kimberlee Josephson wisely explains why political interference in big tech is a big mistake.

Samuel Gregg talks with Jim Otteson about Adam Smith’s jurisprudence.

Blogging at EconLog, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy busts the myth that those of us who oppose industrial policy are guided by a “blind faith in free markets.” Here’s her conclusion:

No offense, but those who truly rely upon blind faith are industrial-policy supporters such as Cass and Griswold who continue to assert that, in the face of lots of evidence to the contrary, government officials can allocate resources better than can the price system. At the very least, unless and until they explain just how politicians and bureaucrats will get and use the knowledge that markets get and use with remarkable success each moment of each day, and how to prevent the fiascos and cronyism produced by past attempts at industrial policy, [Oren] Cass and [Chris] Griswold shouldn’t accuse people other than their fellow supporters of industrial policy of being guided by blind faith.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 246 of F. A. Hayek’s January 1966 essay in the Oriental Economist titled “Personal Recollections of Keynes and the ‘Keynesian Revolution’,” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 12 of Hayek, Contra Keynes and Cambridge (Bruce Caldwell, ed., 1995), which is volume 9 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

Even though the schemata of microeconomics do not claim to achieve those quantitative predictions at which the ambitions of macroeconomics aim, I believe by learning to content ourselves with the more modest aims of the former, we shall gain more insight into at least the principle on which the complex order of economic life operates, than by the artificial simplification necessary for macro theory which tends to conceal nearly all that really matters. I venture to predict that once this problem of method is settled, the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ will appear as an episode during which erroneous conceptions of the appropriate scientific method led to the temporary obliteration of many important insights which we had already achieved and which we shall then have painfully to regain.

‘Following the Science’ – My &(Y#

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

This new piece in The Specator by Fraser Nelson is not to be missed. In it, he reports the substance of his recent discussion about covid policy in Britain with British MP Rishi Sunak. Sunak is currently vying to replace Boris Johnson as Tory leader and, hence, now also as Prime Minister of Great Britain. From February 2020 until early last month Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Here are some slices from Nelson’s piece:

Sunak’s story starts with the first Covid meeting, where ministers were shown an A3 poster from scientific advisers explaining the options. ‘I wish I’d kept it because it listed things that had no impact: banning live events and all that,’ he says. ‘It was saying: you should be careful not to do this stuff too early, because being able to sustain it is very hard in a modern society.’ So the scientific advice was, initially, to reject or at least delay lockdown.

This all changed when Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their famous ‘Report 9’, which argued that Covid casualties could hit 500,000 if no action was taken – but the figure could be below 20,000 if Britain locked down. That, of course, turned out to be a vast exaggeration of lockdown’s ability to curb Covid deaths. Imperial stressed it did ‘not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression, which will be high’. But surely someone involved in making the policy would figure it out.

This was the crux: no one really did. A cost-benefit calculation – a basic requirement for pretty much every public health intervention – was never made. ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off,’ says Sunak. Ministers were briefed by No. 10 on how to handle questions about the side-effects of lockdown. ‘The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’

…..

One of Sunak’s big concerns was about the fear messaging, which his Treasury team worried could have long-lasting effects. ‘In every brief, we tried to say: let’s stop the “fear” narrative. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong.’ The posters showing Covid patients on ventilators, he said, were the worst. ‘It was wrong to scare people like that.’ The closest he came to defying this was in a September 2020 speech saying that it was time to learn to ‘live without fear’ – a direct response to the Cabinet Office’s messaging. ‘They were very upset about that.’

…..

Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while sending the police after people who sat on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present it as ‘following the science’ rather than a political decision, and this had implications for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant elevating Sage, a sprawling group of scientific advisers, into a committee that had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not. There was no socioeconomic equivalent to Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked.

So whoever wrote the minutes for the Sage meetings – condensing its discussions into guidance for government – would set the policy of the nation. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions were reached.

…..

‘I was like: “Summarise for me the key assumptions, on one page, with a bunch of sensitivities and rationale for each one”,’ Sunak says. ‘In the first year I could never get this.’ The Treasury, he says, would never recommend policy based on unexplained modelling: he regarded this as a matter of basic competence. But for a year, UK government policy – and the fate of millions –was being decided by half-explained graphs cooked up by outside academics.

‘This is the problem,’ he says. ‘If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.’ Sir Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has suggested that Sage should have been asked to report to a higher committee, which would have considered the social and economic aspects of locking down. Sunak agrees. But having been anointed from the start, Sage retained its power until the rebellion that came last Christmas.

When the Omicron variant started to rise last December, the dance began again. A Sage analysis claimed that without a fourth lockdown, Covid deaths could hit 6,000 a day. That was out by a factor of 20. But we only know this because, for once, the government rejected Sage’s advice. This time, Sunak was taking soundings of his own – including academics at Stanford University, where he went to business school, and his former colleagues in the world of finance who had started to do some Covid modelling. Crucially, JP Morgan used South African data on Omicron to suggest that UK hospitals would not be overrun – contrary to Sage’s predictions.

…..

At the time, No. 10’s strategy was to create the impression that lockdown was a scientifically created policy which only crackpots dared question. If word leaked that the chancellor had grave reservations, or that a basic cost-benefit analysis had never been applied, it would have been politically unhelpful for No. 10.

Only now can Sunak speak freely. He is opening up not just because he is running to be prime minister, he says, but because there are important lessons in all of this. Not who did what wrong, but how it came to pass that such important questions about lockdown’s profound knock-on effects – issues that will probably dominate politics for years to come – were never properly explored.

…..

And the other lessons of lockdown? ‘We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,’ he says. ‘And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.’ How different? ‘We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.’ Could a more frank discussion have helped Britain avoid lockdown entirely, as Sweden did? ‘I don’t know, but it could have been shorter. Different. Quicker.’

There’s one major factor he doesn’t raise: the opinion polls. Lockdowns were being imposed all over a terrified world in March 2020 and the Prime Minister was already being accused of having blood on his hands by failing to act earlier. Surely whoever was in No. 10 would have been forced to lock down by public opinion? But the public, Sunak says, was being scared witless, while being kept in the dark about lockdown’s -likely effects. ‘We helped shape that: with the fear messaging, empowering the scientists and not talking about the trade-offs.’

…..

To Sunak, this was the problem at the heart of the government’s Covid response: a lack of candour. There was a failure to raise difficult questions about where all this might lead – and a tendency to use fear messaging to stifle debate, instead of encouraging discussion. So in a sentence, how would he have handled the pandemic differently? ‘I would just have had a more grown-up conversation with the country.’