{"id":13928,"date":"2020-03-26T12:48:48","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T16:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13928"},"modified":"2020-03-26T12:55:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T16:55:20","slug":"runciman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2020\/03\/26\/runciman\/","title":{"rendered":"Runciman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LRB Vol. 42 No. 7 \u00b7 2 April 2020<\/a>
Too early or too late?
David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it isn\u2019t just Johnson. In the fights about crisis management we have all been following our political instincts, even when we insist we\u2019re just talking about the science. It\u2019s true that there has been a big difference between the response of the British government \u2013 which appears genuinely to have been guided by the scientific advice it received \u2013 and that of the\u00a0US\u00a0government, which for a long time seemed to be operating on a wing and a prayer. Yet there\u2019s no such thing as simply doing what the science says. This is partly because the science itself is political \u2013 how could it not be, when so much of it is the science of human behaviour? […]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0If you believe that most citizens are more or less capable of doing what is asked of them at the appropriate time then a more interventionist approach will almost certainly save lives in the long run. This is a real argument, based on real evidence. But it still starts with an\u00a0\u2018if\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hayek was wrong about the slippery slope. If planning inevitably led to public demands for more and more preferential treatment and therefore to more and more planning we would hardly be where we are today, trying to deal with a crisis for which we are so ill-prepared, with government bureaucracies stripped of many of the capabilities they are going to need. But the reason we\u2019re in this situation is that Hayek won the argument. Some Western democracies elected Hayekians to government, beginning with Thatcher, who once banged down a copy of Hayek\u2019s\u00a0The Constitution of Liberty<\/em>\u00a0in a meeting and declared: \u2018This<\/em>, gentlemen, is what we believe!\u2019 The direction of travel over the last forty years has been in the Hayekians\u2019 favour: towards deregulation, market competition, global interdependence and winner-take-all economies. The 2008 financial crisis arrested the momentum of that movement but didn\u2019t fundamentally alter its course. Now, though, the future may be more open to lasting change. If this crisis does represent a turning point towards the assertion of greater government control over economic outcomes it won\u2019t be because we were on that slippery slope all along. It will be because \u2013 as Hayek claimed to believe, without ever seeming to think the lesson applied to him \u2013 politics is never\u00a0predictable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LRB Vol. 42 No. 7 \u00b7 2 April 2020 Too early or too late? David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic But it isn\u2019t just Johnson. In the fights about crisis management we have all been following our political instincts, even when we insist we\u2019re just talking about the science. It\u2019s true that there … Continue reading “Runciman”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class","category-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13928"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13930,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13928\/revisions\/13930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}