During the ongoing Chinese coronavirus lockdown, a spooked leadership class put hundreds of millions of healthy people in quarantine on the basis of dodgy research by bureaucrats and airy academics. “Obey science,” which is an ideology and a superstition, replaced “use science,” which means taking data defining what we know and don’t know, looking at competing interpretations, balancing costs and benefits, and, in the case of a new disease, absorbing new data and new ideas.
What we have is a huge, real-life, real-time mess, though the science lemmings are still getting their hefty government and university paychecks. About those 33 million unemployed, most of them low-income workers? Boo hoo. A leading federal economics official just predicted that national unemployment will peak in June at 20 percent. When asked how long it will take to drop, he said, “Nobody knows.” Is that good policy? It’s where the “obey science” crowd leads us. “Nobody knows, but trust us” isn’t a zeppelin I care to take.
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