The behavioural changes necessary to bring about the transition to a zero carbon economy will be far-reaching, bearing on what people eat, how they work, how they travel, the recreations they pursue, and where they live. Will governments be able to rely on the go-to tools of public policy – rational choice theory and more recently behavioural economics, with its so-called ‘nudge’ techniques, to bring about the necessary changes?
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Contemplating a world after COVID, some are calling for a reset of existing models of policymaking. In this essay the authors outline shortcomings in existing neoliberal economic models, and argue that the radical pragmatism of effective crisis response—a willingness to try whatever works, guided by an experimental mindset and commitment to empiricism and measuring results —represents a policymaking model that can and should be applied more widely, not only in times of crisis.
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Reuters reports that, according to an annoucement from China’s state news agency Xinhua on Saturday 17 October 2020, China’s top legislative body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, passed a new biosecurity law aimed at preventing and managing infectious diseases.
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For something that doesn’t exist, race exerts a pernicious and persistent influence on society. Placing people into a racial category, based on observable external features, and then attributing to it holistic ‘cultures’ that determine behaviours or moral character, is not supported by evidence.
But even those who are prepared to go to the barricades to oppose racism perpetuate the notion that race is real. This makes the management of entrenched racism inordinately difficult – but belief in race can be undermined – this is what needs to happen.
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Governments point to scientific advice. Who gets included in powerful expert groups, who gets sidelined and why? Why is epidemiology dominant? What values are implicit in behavioural science techniques like ‘nudging’?
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How appropriate is behavioural economics as a basis for making public policy? Should it be called ‘science’? What does the evidence tell us?
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David McCoy makes some important observations on the relationship between the scientific and non-scientific elements of COVID-19 decision-making; the inherent limitations of modelling – particularly when dealing with a novel virus about little is known.
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The choices made by governments are not based on science, but policy, that mixture of ideology, politics, and pragmatism. Governments are operating on the basis of choices between a range of possible outcomes produced by modelling. That is, projections built on a range of assumptions and suppositions. Governments should not be able to avoid scrutiny and accountability for their actions by leaning on the authority of science.
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Seeping faintly through the pronouncements and policies of some government responses to the coronavirus pandemic are the vapours of older belief systems; a whiff of utilitarianism, the scent of social Darwinism, and the fetid reek of eugenics. Examination of the UK government’s ‘herd immunity’ pandemic response suggests that it is not too farfetched to connect contemporary politics with these ostensibly outdated ideas.
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Is Australian Prime Minister Morrison’s call for a Royal Commission on matters related to the recent bushfires just a smokescreen, an excuse for avoiding real action, or is it a genuine attempt to get a body of evidence and a report on which the government could build a holistic strategy for addressing global warming, which should be applauded?
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