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LN's avatar

i actually looked into the whole expert consensus against travel bans for pandemics thing because that was the vivid, counterintuitive takeaway from my recollection of the ebola scare in the obama era, and basically it's a meta-level rather than an object-level strategy. the thinking is that if the first country to detect a potentially pandemic pathogen is reflexively subject to something tantamount to crippling sanctions, this disincentivizes early reporting and encourages covering things up. which i do think makes a certain amount of sense.

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typhoonjim's avatar

The problem is as always a trust issue. The larger meta-problem is that there are dividends to trust, which also accrue through the breaking of trust. This is true even in deleterious cases, because all you have to do is effectively outrun the effect.

It has felt my whole life like authorities of all kinds have abused trust, but the replacement authorities mostly leverage the dividends of trust-breaking while carrying a bomb with a timer on it, which they hope will be long enough to get out of the building before we notice.

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