On Aaron Carroll's Coronavirus cap-and-trade

It feels odd for me to take issue with recommendations from Aaron Carroll on how to deal with the risk of coronavirus infection, individually and collectively. In March, Carroll was prescient on what we as a country needed to do (and, with Trump in charge, inevitably failed to do) after we'd already let community transmission run rampant -- reduce infections via shelter-in-place, and use the breathing room to ramp up testing. He is a trusted source on nutrition, medicine and healthcare policy, able to sift through piles of published studies and assess the evidence, as he did on core nutritional questions in The Bad Food Bible.

But I feel there's something off about Carroll's approach in today's column to risk balancing in response to the pandemic. No one should have any beef with the main point: when you give up one major form of risk mitigation (e.g, when you go back to school), don't give up all others (e.g., by congregating in basements). But how, then, to balance risks? Envisioning our individual conduct as "piles" of risk-mitigating and risk-enlarging decisions, Carroll writes:

Election 2010: How marginal was the messaging?

Today Brendan Nyhan hammers home his signature theme: presidents don't move public opinion by speechifying.  He has been relentless about this for years. Reagan couldn't move the public to support the Contras; Bush couldn't do it for social security privatization; and Obama didn't do it with his Sept. '09 speech promoting health care reform.

A natural corollary is that elections are determined mainly by structural factors: the state of the economy, the number of seats the in-party has to defend, the proportion of those seats that are in the opposing party's traditional territory, etc.. On the eve of the last election, Nyhan had a memorable post cataloging every oft-recited narrative about Obama's imagined failures of messaging or strategy, with links to past posts debunking most of them.

As it turned out, the Republicans out-performed the structural models, the most commonly cited of which, by Douglas Hibbs, forecast a gain of about 45 seats. Why?  Aspects of the current economic woe that the model could not capture?  Extraordinary GOP messaging that maximized the structural advantage? 

On November 11, Nyhan and colleagues Eric McGhee and John Sides published an Election Postmortem reporting some preliminary numbers crunching. No dominant explanation emerged.The Tea Party's impact seems to have been marginal. Money was not decisive. Structural factors explained much, but not the size of the victory margin.

The authors did find one factor, though, that raises more questions than it answers, and that I found astonishing on its face: that most House Democrats paid dearly for every 'yes' vote they cast on major legislation.  The writeup of this finding should be digested in full:

Something was missing in Obama's Oval Office speech...

Everything about Obama's oval office speech about the Gulf oil spill tonight was predictable and effective -- except his call for a new energy bill.

This time, for me, his familiar riff about the nation's history of rising to major challenges, mustered in support of action to change our energy consumption and production, rang a bit hollow:

The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet know precisely how to get there. We know we'll get there.

It rang hollow because, while the echoes of his advocacy for health care reform were striking,  so was a core difference: he did not lay out the "core elements" of the bill he wanted.