This has been a tough year in many ways, and many familiar solaces have had to be discarded for the duration of the pandemic. That has made the pleasurable things that we can still enjoy all the more important, and one of those is reading. My weekly periodicals have assumed an even greater role in my health and sanity, not least because of their honest and detailed coverage of the pandemic itself.
The Economist is the best. For me it is the Amazon of journalism. It follows a relentless pursuit of clear and worthwhile goals, and as a result steadily builds competitive advantage to trample rivals in a self-reinforcing loop. As quality local newspapers, then national newspapers, then TV news channels have retreated towards celebrity flimflam on the way to obsolescence, The Economist strides forward vacuuming up market share. The BBC is clinging on, and a few quality papers are still strong, but the depth of their coverage compared with ten years ago has declined. Who now have people on the ground in many African countries? Who can give a thoughtful and content-sourced article on Nagorno Karabakh? Who can write beyond the propaganda to document how China is truly developing? Increasingly, there is only one player in town.
The Economist can still be annoying, notably their persistence in retaining some MI5 jerk to contribute cold war rubbish once per month or so. The review of Scott Anderson’s CIA exposé The Quiet Americans plainly required much iteration with internal censors.
The weekly feature writers are generally excellent, most notably Chaguan in China. Bartleby is plainly a cynical old fart like me and I am in awe of his self-deprecating humour. Lexington manages to retain some decorum and distance amidst the chaos of current US politics.
For me the weakest of the regular features tends to be Free Exchange. These contributors give a sense of intellectual snobbery and orthodoxy. Most of the others seem to be curious and to a more diverse range of inputs. Having said that, this week’s Free Exchange challenging conventional wisdom comparing policies to respond to climate change was excellent.
But the Free Exchange article Which Market Model is Best from a couple of weeks ago to me typifies the former less curious Economist. The article started well by describing emerging models of capitalist economies, describing LME’s, CME’s and PME’s, the initial letter referring to limbering, coordinated and political. Think the US, Germany and China as archetypal examples.
The article then compared the performance of the archetypes during the pandemic, finding much evidence to support the guiding principles behind the various models. LME’s rely more on individuals and markets rather than institutions, so initial responses were often haphazard, while on the other hand most of the game-changing innovation is coming out of LME’s, with the UK given a particular shout out. CME’s appear more organised in the face of a challenge like the pandemic, able to forge a more coherent strategy to keep ahead of a crisis, while their innovation is more likely to be incremental. PME’s can mobilise radical actions quickly with compliance, as China’s ruthless suppression of the pandemic exemplifies, but it was in China that corruption and fear allowed the pandemic to take hold in the first place.
These are all good arguments, but the article completely loses its way when it decides it should issue awards, declaring which of the models is the best within the context of the pandemic. Old dogmas kicked in. Whereas many Economist contributors have started to regularly challenge LME orthodoxy, such enlightenment has yet to reach the Free Exchange office. Incredibly, first prize in the pandemic was awarded to LME’s.
This is stretch worthy of a Trump campaign advert. Surely we have to start with the figures. Where are the most preventable deaths occurring? Where is civil society most under strain? LME’s remain an unholy mess, even six months or more after initial outbreaks. Compare the US and Canada, the UK and Germany, Brazil and Uruguay and The Philippines and China. True, raw competence, context and luck play a part, but it is hard to argue that many LME’s are relatively safe, calm or fair places just now.
If Free Exchange had not started from intellectual categories like innovation, and not felt constrained by seeking arguments to justify a pre-determined first prize, it might have provided more useful insight. An examination of why more people are dying and suffering in LME’s might have been more effective.
LME’s tend to lead to high and growing inequality, which is an important root cause of pandemic failure in a number of ways. An unequal society often has a large minority living in cramped conditions with no savings and restricted access to medical care. These communities as a vulnerable economically as there are from a health perspective, and have less opportunity to comply with guidelines to restrict virus spread.
Then there is the looser concept of a coherent society. LME’s emphasise individual agency and downplay the role of government and institutions. It is no surprise that “we are all in this together” rings less true and that trust in government guidelines is low, leading to low compliance. Empathy for those of different tribes can vanish.
Arguably, simple competence becomes an issue in LME’s over time. At least I could argue that while marketing might become stronger, patient project management can suffer. It is more likely in LME’s that medical and other technical competences are allocated towards capital accumulation of citizen’s welfare.
I also trust an economic recovery more in a CME than an LME, although that has yet to be proven. LME’s crave growth driven by consumption, and that requires everybody to spend. Even before the pandemic, this could only be sustained by ever-increasing personal debt, and a sudden shock has seen the edifice crashing down. It will take more than a few stimulus checks to rebuild; indeed arguably it will not be possible to rebuild at all without discarding some LME shibboleths.
The most damning argument that Free Exchange could make against PME’s was that corruption and nepotism would make any innovation untrustworthy. It is a fair point, and I certainly won’t rush to take a vaccine only approved in China or Russia. But, as Kamala Harris said on Wednesday night, if Fauci tells me a vaccine is safe then I’ll be first in line, but if the recommendation comes from Trump, count me out. It is not only PME’s where trust becomes fatally eroded.
I like the model classifications, and Free Exchange is right that they can produce insights. Like all models it is incomplete and has fuzzy edges: an incompetent PME or one without civic goals will always perform worse than a CME or LME with competence. Many economies will be hybrids and evolve over time.
Still, the method of taking an important issue and using it to compare outcomes between models and analyse root causes can be powerful. The Economist generally does this well, but not when the winner is declared before the analysis starts. Free Exchange, you can do better. Get out more.
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