The dangerous and consequential narrative collapse during Covid...

Today’s email is co-authored with Sully Meyer, Neal Reddy, and Ryan Vuono. On the topic of Covid, you may also be interested in previous emails on why you should be very optimistic about the vaccine efficacy or the emerging consensus that lockdowns are no longer justified.

Polarization didn’t used to be a matter of life and death

We’ve known for a long time that we live in a polarized country – op-ed hosts and podcasters (us included) have beat the proverbial dead horse for years now. Yet before the pandemic, political polarization was largely a Beltway problem. Aside from not being able to talk to their provocative relatives (and not benefiting from a government that could pass sweeping legislation that tangibly improves their lives), the average, working-class American went along their day, regardless of what Trump had said or what partisan battle was happening at the time.

With Covid, we’ve seen polarization become a matter of life and death. There is a clear discrepancy between the social distancing precautions taken by right-leaning Americans and everyone else. For instance, a survey by Johns Hopkins found in April that  76 percent of American adults “supported social distancing to control coronavirus.” However, while 89% of Democrats viewed social distancing as “very important,” only 66% of Republicans agreed. 

Even the economic response almost once verged into dangerous territory, as President Trump reportedly toyed with the idea of distributing aid based on a state’s immigration policies. Crisis, in other words, has accentuated the polarization and made it more apparente – almost the complete inverse of America in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks nearly two decades ago.

Narrative collapse fuels polarization

Polarization has only widened as the anti-establishment, anti-science skepticism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem has become more aggressive as the virus progressed. American conservatives have long adopted a skepticism towards government, and they likely feel vindicated by the narrative collapse – the ill-advised and failed attempts to attach simple, reductive causality or narrative to complex problems – in left-wing media and among technocratic institutions. Podcast host Eric Weinstein characterized it as a phenomenon where “the narratives cannot keep up anymore.” Truly surprising things arrive so quickly such that the “Gated Institution Narratives” (GIN) don’t know what to say.  

The irreconcilable conflict can be perfectly embodied by the attitude towards mask wearing and social distancing. One side stands for trust in the absolute truth of science and in centralized transmission of scientific guidelines; the other symbolizes a fundamental distrust of any centralized institution that is assumed to use crises to gain greater control over individual liberty. Both sides see the other as insane, deadly, and destructive. This split is explained very well by Lex Fridman and Michael Malice in their recent podcast conversation at ~2:31:00. 

Robinson Meyer, founder of The COVID Tracking Project, discussed various aspects of the narrative collapse in our interview. For instance, the CDC was comparatively slow to encourage the public on the effectiveness of masks, in part due to a perceived panic buy that would limit the PPE supply. But no matter what the intention may be, from a public trust perspective, this was a colossal blunder that may have outweighed the behavioral economics issue of panic buying, as conservative circles use this example to justify their flouting of mask mandates.

Meanwhile, the encouragement of Black Lives Matter protests by the same public officials that restricted restaurants and small businesses provided more fodder for the skeptical American right. Corruption and mendacity have long been the signature talking points of the New Right, dating back to Newt Gingrich’s takedown of establishment Democrats. The narrative that social distancing is patriotic and selfless – an idea that should appeal to the nationalist elements of Trump’s supporters – took a huge dive after these protests and flip-flopping by politicians. 

Academic studies distorted by narrative-driven media

The debate on whether BLM protests led to massive spikes in Covid cases was a prime example of the narrative collapse and mischaracterization of academic literature.  

In June 2020, we saw headlines such as “Research Determines Protests Did Not Cause Spike In Coronavirus Cases” and “Why the Black Lives Matter Protests Didn’t Contribute to COVID-19 Surge.” They were citing the same economics working paper by Dave et al. (2020) published that month. 

But these headlines and news articles almost completely mischaracterized the study. That paper only showed that people living in the areas where the protests occurred adapted to the circumstances and practiced more social distancing, so the overall case counts in these cities didn’t go up. In other words, it’s not at all saying that the BLM protests didn’t get people sick or that the protests were socially distant. Anyone who has taken introductory econometrics would know that there are also just simply too many confounding variables to definitively conclude anything.

The study was incorrectly cited by the Left as proving that the protests were completely safe and socially distant because of mask wearing, not realizing that other behaviors by locals curtailed the spread. Meanwhile, conservative media saw the so-called safe gatherings of the BLM protestors as a justification for their own rallies and proposed openings, while ignoring the key caveat of other mitigating measures. The paper ended up becoming a political Rorschach test, and it causes backlash that ends up undermining the actual underlying progressive causes.

The criticisms for these articles were largely valid. Economists affiliated with the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) publish working papers all the time. They’re not yet peer-reviewed, and many of them end up getting destroyed by their colleagues and turn out to be not rigorous or flat-out wrong. Correlation ≠ Causality.

Also, why should the economists be telling me whether BLM caused Covid case spikes and not public health experts and data scientists? Most economists also have a far-from-nuanced understanding of disease transmission and simply deal with aggregate data with traditional econometric methodologies, so such a study should have never been immediately taken as the proof of anything. 

The political expediency to appeal to ideologies with “facts”

This BLM economics working paper is only one of the many out there that have led to unintended secondary effects – namely the mischaracterizations and superficial interpretations of academic studies that end up distorting the public’s view on the “truth.”  

In short, we’ve had too many politically expedient but scientifically inaccurate narratives across the political spectrum throughout this pandemic. These media platforms cherry-pick superficial “facts” that are phrased and portrayed in certain ways catering to the ideological leanings of their base, who then use these “facts” to reinforce their ideological stance on various matters and see the other side as ignorant fact-deniers or morally corrupt partisan hacks.

The problem of polarization, therefore, is not just political discourse “without facts,” but rather a discourse that is filled with “facts” that are far from the holy grail of truths you think they ought to be.

Tiger GaoComment