Michael Lewis Is Mostly (But Not Entirely) Right About Why Our Covid Response Sucked
When media is dumb, government is dumber
When I think about why governments around the world did so badly with Covid, I think about Glenn Beck. When I was at EPA in 2009, Beck did a segment about “EPA Indoctrination”. Here’s a transcript from his radio show:
GLENN BECK: The EPA just announced plans to stop by and teach your kids their cute little message about energy efficiency and climate change. But don't worry. They're only planning to go to 6,000 schools to promote their "Go Green” nights and, quote, help families learn about energy efficient changes that they can make in their own homes and schools to save energy and help fight climate change.
PAT GRAY (fellow talk radio host): Seriously?
GLENN: Yes.
WHOA!!! SERIOUSLY??? (by the way: Boffo work, Pat -- way to keep the segment rolling) WHAT A SCOOP!!! EPA was busted cold: We had, indeed, embarked on a dastardly plot to encourage kids to turn off the lights when they leave the room and shut off the faucet while they brush their teeth. So, basically Khmer Rouge-style reeducation camps. It became a whole right-wing media thing, even though our message was essentially the same as in my dad’s ground-breaking 1986 public awareness campaign: Shut That Damn Door -- We’re Not Trying to Air Condition the Entire Goddamned State of Kentucky!
A meeting was called in response to the segment. “Who gives a rat’s dick about Glenn Beck?” I said, displaying the trademark grace that put my career on the fast-track. As it turned out, my bosses gave a rat’s dick...and in fact not just a rat’s dick, but many rats’ dicks -- I believe the collective noun is a gaggle of rats’ dicks -- about Glenn Beck. And by “my bosses”, I don’t mean my immediate bosses, i.e. the career public servants I worked with every day. I mean their bosses, the “politicals”, i.e. the people who sweep into your agency as a reward for helping the president win Pumpkinhump County, and who then sweep right back out, usually within a week of figuring out how to use their office phone.
This divide between the civil service and political appointees is a major theme of Michael Lewis’ excellent new book, The Premonition ($18 on Amazon, or I’ll sell you my copy for $5 but I spilled spaghetti sauce on it). Lewis recounts the ways that the government’s response to Covid was unorganized, slow, myopic, and just generally...shit. It was the Avenue 5 of pandemic responses: Widely agreed to be crap even though there was reason to think it was going to be good. Lewis tells a compelling story about how misaligned incentives led to bad decision-making. My experience leads me to believe that his analysis is right, though a bit incomplete. I think that to understand why governments make bad decisions, we need to look at some of the media’s more hack-ish tendencies.
Let’s start with the relationship between political appointees and the career civil service, which is discussed at length in both The Premonition and in Lewis’ previous book, The Fifth Risk ($15 on Amazon, but I know a dude who’ll hook you up for $6 -- go to the southeast corner of Prospect Park and ask for Viper). Political appointees -- and the bright-eyed twerp staffers they bring with them -- are different from career civil servants in two ways: 1) Appointees tend to be sharp dressers, while most civil servants look like Bernie Sanders after three nights sleeping in his car; and 2) Their jobs are temporary. Politicals last an absolute maximum of eight years, and within that time frame, 99 percent of the younger ones will leave, launch a startup, watch it completely Hindenburg, and then sell it to Google for $8 million anyway. This makes them incredibly risk-averse, because all they want from their government job is to avoid some horrible fuckup that will follow them forever. To wit: Son of Sam was a career civil servant. An appointee would never have risked having the unsightly blemish of a six-person killing spree follow him to his next job.
That’s why my EPA bosses cared about Glenn Beck; they didn’t want to get a call from the White House asking “why are you on Fox News every night?” Beck ended up altering government policy; we shuttered that (extremely minor) program. Because who cares about the program’s benefits? If it carries costs -- and the “cost” side of the ledger is the only side anyone cares about -- then you shitcan that thing like a Christmas newsletter from a college acquaintance.
Poker players call this “tilt” -- distorted cost/benefit analysis leading to bad decisions. It’s what Brad Pitt was fighting in another Michael Lewis book, Moneyball. The government tilts heavily away from risk, but that doesn’t always tell us much. What, for example, was the risk-averse course of action when it came to guidance on mask wearing? Encouraging mask-wearing caused some people to shit a brick, but discouraging mask-wearing -- as the CDC and WHO initially did -- caused different bricks to be shat. Decisions often don’t fit into a clear risky/safe binary -- what’s the “safe” move regarding monetary policy? Or drug approval? To better understand what the government sees as “safe”, we need to look at the media.
The media has enormous power over the government. They conjure the shitstorms that political appointees badly want to avoid. In extreme cases, they can summon that most dreaded of beasts: the Congressional hearing. Appointees live in fear of hostile Congressional hearings. And agency old-timers talk of past hearings like sailors in a dockside bar spinning yarns about the horrors they witnessed -- every civil servant with at least 25 years of experience has a tale of the time Patrick Moynihan emerged from the deep and shattered their humble agency to splinters with a single blow of his mighty tentacle.
I gained a new perspective on the interplay between government and media when I left EPA to write for Last Week Tonight. I was basically put on the other side of the ball; in government, I played defense, in media, I was on offense. Of course, my “media” role was a comedy show -- it was largely writing jokes about funny-acting animals and finding new ways to call Trump a dipshit -- but it was definitely media. And in my years there, I thought a lot about what makes a good story.
One thing I learned was that scientists think in numbers, but humans think in narratives. If you ask a scientist “is this dangerous?”, they’ll put together an equation that spits out a number that represents risk. But if you put the same question to, like, a homo sapiens, they'll draw on a story about a person who did the thing and either ended up fine or ended up extremely not-fine. A good narrative has elements people recognize; something about it resonates and reflects their understanding of the world and their place in it. So, it reinforces their worldview; narratives that challenge the audience only work for audiences that want to be challenged, and those are rare.
Once you start looking for narratives, you spot them everywhere. Here are some preferred narratives I’ve noticed in various corners of media:
Local News:
Local animal is adorable
Local man commits crime so gruesome you wonder if they should be describing it on network TV at 6 PM
Local prodigy makes you feel like shit by achieving more at age 12 than you have in your entire worthless life
Local man commits gruesome crime against local prodigy and this time it doesn’t seem quite so bad
Weather shitty, traffic a nightmare, local sports team sucks...why do you even live here?
Investigative News:
The government’s asleep at the wheel and as a result, old ladies are dying -- let’s meet them one-by-one
That thing you love to eat has cat shit in it
We obtained secret documents and to be frank they’re pretty “meh”, but hey...SECRET DOCUMENTS!
Our reporter spent 20 months investigating minor fraud in this local government office and it would be rude not to run what he found
This scammer ran a scam and we’ll kindly ask you to ignore how fucking obvious it was
Fox News:
Immigrants are coming to get you
Communists are coming to get you
Terrorists are coming to get you
“Gang-bangers” -- yes, that’s the euphemism we’ll use -- are coming to get you
Immigrants, communists, terrorists, and “gang-bangers” are coming to get you, aided by those limp-wristed, America-hating Democrats
Legacy Media:
Racism
Racism
Racism
Racism/sexism
An inexplicably in-depth look at a quiet, quirky corner of the world -- e.g. an old man in Maine who makes glasses for squirrels, or a non-profit canoe-building program for quadruple amputees -- that hints at some deeper, subtextual meaning but might actually just be idiosyncratic bullshit that you don’t need to know
Stories that fit preferred narratives are solid gold to a media outlet; I can only imagine the collective creaming of the jeans that must have happened at the MSNBC office when the Ukraine phone call story broke. Stories that fit potent narratives are the ones political appointees fear most; those stories can turn into a whole damn thing. They might even get you hauled in front of Congress, where you’ll have to eat shit dished out by Jim fucking Jordan, and you won’t even be able to say anything about his stupid Van Heusen shirt or all the wrestling stuff.
In my experience, government goes to great lengths to avoid stories that fit salient media narratives; l’affair de Glenn Beck was just one example. The over-emphasis on certain stories can cause bad decision-making, because narrative potency isn’t the same as real-world importance. Consider: Should the government have devoted so much time and attention to the Elian Gonzalez saga? Wouldn’t a box and postage-paid return label to Cuba have done the trick?
The outsized role that juicy narratives play in the government psyche is bad enough; the fact that the media sometimes twists stories to fit preferred narratives makes things even worse. When they do this, the government makes policy in response to a “reality” that’s badly distorted. Fox News are the masters of this -- they cause more distortion than all the black holes in the universe combined -- but even reputable outlets fall into this trap. I understand the pressures that people who work in media are under, because I felt those pressures at Last Week Tonight; if I was writing a story, I wanted it to work. There’s also a lot of sunk cost fallacy involved -- I once fought extra-hard for a story because I put off watching the Top Chef finale to write it. Of course, if you let those pressures get to you, you can end up with a misleading piece, and I was definitely involved in those.
A quick caveat before I tell this story: I loved working at Last Week Tonight, and I think we did some good stuff in the six years I was there. In a way, my experience at LWT was like my experience at EPA: I left feeling that it’s an organization of mostly-good people responding to frequently-backwards incentives. In both cases, I think it’s healthy to talk about the times when things went wrong; this story is about one of those times.
In 2019, we -- and by “we” I mean “the show”, I was only lightly involved and regrettably did not write the “cat going down on you” joke -- did a story about medical devices. The main bit of information in the piece is, in my opinion, solid: The FDA has a process called the “501(k) pathway” through which medical devices can skip the normal approval process as long as they’re “substantially similar” to an existing product. Some very-harmful products have been cleared through this process, and I think there’s a strong case that it needs major reform.
That point makes up the first nine minutes of a 19-minutes piece. So: What’s the remaining ten minutes? It’s vestigial bits of info left over from a narrative about undue corporate influence on the FDA that pretty much completely fell apart. But remnants of that storyline made it to air because “this process should be reformed” is a bland narrative, but “this process should be reformed but it hasn’t been because evil corporate lobbyists are controlling the government” is spicy as hell. A researcher had pitched the corporate influence angle and then kept pushing it even as the claims of shenanigans turned out to be pretty much entirely false (or at least unproven). But, things collapsed so late in the game that it was deemed too late to totally change course. In one case, frantic googling by our Executive Producer minutes before cameras started rolling led to a last-minute cut of a major section that had been in the piece, green-lit by that same researcher, for weeks. In the end, I think we ended up with a piece that’s not really untrue, but that hints at a narrative we couldn’t back up, and we portrayed the issue as pretty black-and-white even though there are tradeoffs involved (a more thorough review process will make it harder for new products to get to market). Plus, you can still see traces of the deleted narrative: At one point, we say “device manufacturers have lobbied” against more regulations, which implies wrongdoing but is -- by itself -- a remarkably anodyne statement, since every company larger than a lemonade stand lobbies on everything. And in the video that wraps up the piece, we accuse the FDA of being “so far up medical device manufacturers’ asses you can only locate them with a duodenoscope.” That line is completely unsubstantiated. I lobbied for it to be cut and was told “we’ve already filmed it.”
I thought of that piece when the FDA and CDC paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I knew that “a delay in vaccine availability will result in deaths that will only be visible through statistical analysis” is a shitty narrative, but “the FDA approved a vaccine that killed a lady and this is her name!!!” is powerful. I’m sure that the FDA -- somewhat understandably -- wanted to avoid that story at all costs. There’s little doubt in my mind that fear of the “they said it was safe but it WASN’T” narrative influenced all sorts of decisions, from the initial CDC decision not to allow tests from private companies to guidance about how to handle virus on surfaces. Those decisions were overly-cautious; we now know that we did not, in fact, need to frantically scrub our groceries like a bunch of meth-addicted shoeshine boys.
I think the more that we encourage the media to avoid trafficking in cheap narratives, the better our government will function. Getting the government to respond to reality, instead of the funhouse-mirror version of reality presented by the more hack-ish corners of the media, will improve results. Which is an academic way of saying: For government to function better, it needs to be free to ignore the likes of Glenn goddamned motherfucking Beck.