What the Ebola Experts Miss: Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-what-the-ebola-experts-miss-1413847021
The travel ban addresses the real danger: public panic.
Of course we should ban all nonessential travel from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and any other country badly hit by the Ebola virus. The lesson of the crisis so far isn’t that this protocol rather than that one should have been used in a Dallas hospital, or that the Centers for Disease Control needs better leadership, or more money, or sharper focus, or all of the above. It’s not even about Ron Klain ’s intriguing qualifications as Ebola czar.
The lesson is that government bureaucracy should be treated, at every level, as inherently and inescapably incompetent. And that expert opinion should be viewed as mistaken until proven otherwise. Meanwhile, wield a blunt instrument.
Government incompetence is the obvious side of this story. “You’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems,” President Obama told Ohio State graduates last year. “You should reject these voices.”
Well, in the last two years alone, we’ve had incompetence eruptions involving the CDC, the Secret Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, healthcare.gov, the IRS (taking a charitable interpretation) and the State Department. These aren’t voices. They are facts. They are reminders that the age-old debate between liberals and conservatives about what government should do is, in a sense, misplaced. The first question to ask is what government can do.
Can the Transportation Security Administration be reliably trusted to do health checks on inbound passengers from West Africa? The question answers itself. Hence the need for a travel ban.
But now let’s turn to the less obvious lesson, the one about the experts.
“The problem,” Mr. Obama said the other day by way of explaining his reluctance to impose a ban, “is that in all the discussions I’ve had thus far with experts in the field, experts in infectious disease, is that a travel ban is less effective than measures we are currently instituting, that involve screening passengers who are coming from West Africa.”
A nice thought, of the kind experts often have. Except it assumes that the process of screening and keeping track of potentially infected passengers once they are in the U.S. will be carried out effectively. It assumes, further, that the problem of Ebola in America is about Ebola alone.
It isn’t. It’s also about the panic that even a handful of cases can stir in the public, and the inevitable economic and political costs of managing that panic. Already we’re a country in an uproar on the basis of three confirmed cases of the disease. What if there were 30—or 300?
Why do the experts so often miss this point? Maybe it’s because they conflate the irrational with the unreal; the notion that, if a fear is groundless the fear is immaterial. Or maybe they assume that fear moves in the same direction as probability, when often they’re inversely correlated.
The chance of your dying of ordinary flu this season considerably exceeds the chance of your contracting and dying of Ebola. But so what? Ask yourself this: Is your behavior more likely to be swayed by the very considerable chance that you could die in the very unlikely event of your contracting Ebola? Or does the unlikely chance of dying in the far more likely chance of getting the flu worry you more?
These are the kinds of everyday psychological realities so often missed by the experts—by people who are, perhaps, too smart to comprehend the dumb world, or too arrogant to appreciate that the dumb world doesn’t always bend to their designs. Yet we have now had more than a century’s worth of experience with government by experts, starting with the progressive administration of Woodrow Wilson.
It hasn’t worked out so well. Experts want government to function like a Cartier watch: self-winding, with hundreds of parts and various complications. But good government is a $30 Timex from Wal-Mart . Or a sundial. Simple and reliable beats expensive and fragile every time.
Politics being what they are, you can expect Mr. Obama to bend to public pressure and impose a ban should there be another Ebola arrival. It is astonishing that the administration hasn’t already done it, if only to get ahead of yet another potential public-relations debacle. If there is any point to having Mr. Klain as Ebola czar, it’s to tell the president that.
While he’s at it, maybe he can suggest that the government will underwrite the expense of chartering planes to Monrovia and Freetown, so long as their purposes are medical and humanitarian. Costs can always be covered by fewer Obama family vacations.
Rationalist that I am, I have a hard time seeing Ebola as the next Spanish flu. But rationalism shouldn’t exclude reasonableness, and the reasonable answer to Ebola is to address reasonable public fears about the safety of the planes they fly and the hospitals where they are treated. The alternative is a further erosion of trust, and a potential epidemic of fear, nearly as dangerous as an exotic African virus now on our shores.
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