Many economists, after noting that government regulations have harmful unintended consequences, advocate replacing government regulation with government-provided information. These economists see the bad consequences of having government officials make decisions for people and not allowing people to make their own decisions. At the same time, they argue, the government officials might have good information and if they simply provide that information to the public, that will improve the situation.
In the cases other economists and I discuss, a replacement of regulation with government provision of information would be an improvement. With such a shift from regulation to information provision, people could take the government’s information into account but still make their own decisions. Would it be preferable to a situation with no regulation? For it to be preferable, the government would have to provide good information and not mislead people. But does the government generally provide good information? Figuring out the answer would take years of research, but recent evidence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some basic reasoning about government officials’ incentives, should make us hesitant to trust government information.
This is from David R. Henderson, “Less Regulation, More Information: Better Results?” my latest article at Defining Ideas, published on June 3.
Another excerpt, in which I point out the tough spot Dr. Rochelle Walensky is in:
The second area in which good information would have been helpful is in guiding the decisions, not only of state and local governments but also of individuals, about whether to mask while outdoors. It never made much sense to me to wear a mask while walking outdoors unless I was in a densely packed crowd with no movement, the kind of crowd you might see in a “mosh pit” at a rock conference. (Disclosure: I have never been in a mosh pit and plan never to be in one.)
It turns out that my intuition was right. According to Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, who also holds a master’s degree in public health, “viral particles disperse quickly in the outside air.” Gandhi cites a number of studies that find that well under 1 percent of investigated infections were linked to outdoor transmission. In one study from China, only one case out of 7,324 (0.0137 percent) was contracted outdoors. Yet on April 27, the CDC’s Walensky stated, “Less than 10 percent of documented transmission in many studies has occurred outdoors.” Well, yes. Although one or two studies did find a little less than 10 percent, most found well below 1 percent. So Walensky’s information was true but misleading.
In Walensky’s defense, she was arguing that masking outdoors was generally unnecessary. My guess is that she was trying to do her best as a medical professional but was feeling strong opposition both from within the White House and from members of the public who support President Biden and strongly support masking.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 6 2021 at 3:04pm
Understatement is often a good rhetorical strategy. If there are people who “strongly support masking” maybe “less than 10%” sounds more believable/persuasive than “well less than 1%.”
Surely there are better examples of misleading information.
MarkW
Jun 6 2021 at 5:11pm
I disagree that ‘less than 10%’ is merely a nice, polite, possibly tactically effective equivalent. There is (obviously) more than an order-of-magnitude difference between ‘as much as 10%’ and ‘a fraction of one percent’ with very different implications for both personal behavior and public policy. And what has been (and continues to be) more important that accurate information about the risks of Covid-19 infection? Surely there are other examples of misleading government information, but are there others that are topical and impactful?
Jon Murphy
Jun 6 2021 at 9:53pm
The point is about reliability of government information, not rhetoric (though, as a former consultant and current professor, I can tell you rhetorically being technically correct but tactically useless like that is an express ticket to getting fired).
Providing misleading information is not reliable. MarkW points out the problems for planning. Part of the problem of this pandemic (and which Roger Koppl and I have been harping on for the past year) is that the experts here are not incentivized to provide useful and reliable information. People cannot push back when their advice is not reliable. As a consultant, my clients could fire me when I behaved so poorly as an expert. But the CDC just shrugs their shoulders, their bad information begets bad policy.
This is why one needs public choice. Lest one become a bad expert himself.
Andrew_FL
Jun 7 2021 at 8:51am
The trouble isn’t with the government giving its information. The trouble is with the government giving its opinion.
In your negative examples, the government is editorializing by withholding information it is presumably aware of, or editorializing by calling some information it shares “official guidance” and denying that imprimatur to other information.
Your positive information example is the government simply offering a bare statistic.
Of course, if the government’s opinions didn’t carry inordinate weight with many, many people, even this wouldn’t be too much of problem. But they do.
TMC
Jun 7 2021 at 10:46am
“The trouble is with the government giving its opinion.”
This is true all over. Many of the problem papers in science are from conclusions that don’t even fit the data presented in the paper.
Arguments against catastrophic climate change often use data from the underlying IPCC papers to argue against the report’s conclusions. ClimateAudit was famous for this.
Max More
Jun 9 2021 at 12:15pm
TMC: The executive summary of the IPCC report differs from the content of the actual papers making up the report. The media coverage of the executive summary differ even more. Of course, the difference from the actual papers is always in an alarmist direction. Using the real content of the report to argue against alarmism is therefore perfectly reasonable. You seem to be suggesting otherwise, although it wasn’t clear to me.
TMC
Jun 10 2021 at 1:17pm
We are in agreement Max.
Jon Murphy
Jun 7 2021 at 12:10pm
Your point is well-taken, but that’s true regardless of who is giving information. Any expert, when asked to provide information, must make judgement calls about what information to provide. Thus, there is always some “editorializing” going on. That’s why it’s called “expert opinion.”
Andrew_FL
Jun 7 2021 at 4:17pm
Right, which is why the real problem is the inordinate weight given to Government Opinion by certain sorts of folks. Which is why I said that was the real problem.
aretae
Jun 7 2021 at 11:18am
You say:
That’s too strong.
A move away from regulation and towards information provision is a pure win in the US, with it being illegal for the government to forbid alternate opinions.
In China, perhaps, where it’s often illegal to disagree with the government, then the value proposition is a great deal less. But with multiple sources of information, and a proper distrust of authority, information provision is a pure win over regulation.
Of course, it may be that you were arguing that once the government is one provider of information among many, we have no reason to believe that the government is better at information provision than other providers, and they may ought to abandon the role.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2021 at 11:57am
You write:
I agree with you, or, more correctly since I made that point in the article, you agree with me.
You write:
I’m arguing that if government doesn’t provide good information, then government provision of information along with no regulation is inferior to no government provision of information along with no regulation.
Christophe Biocca
Jun 7 2021 at 8:50pm
Even information that’s bad on its own can be useful when combined with other sources. To take an extreme example, if someone only reports when a repeated coin toss comes up heads and leaves unmentioned the opposite cases, it’s useless at telling you whether a coin is biased. If you have another source with the reverse bias though, they combine into the full information you need. As long as the government’s press release/website/data dump contains new information not already known, a sufficiently-savvy reader can get some use out of it.
Kind of like portfolio diversification, where adding a new asset riskier than all the existing ones can still lower overall risk, as long as it is somewhat uncorrelated.
That’s still only an argument in favor or making available information the government would have even if it wasn’t planning on giving it to the public. Spending tax dollars on getting new information just for public consumption may still not be worth it.
Vivian Darkbloom
Jun 9 2021 at 5:33am
Late to the discussion here but I ran across this article today which confirmed what I’ve always thought of those plexiglass barriers–they provide zero benefit (at an estimated $750 million cost in the US).
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/small-business/plexiglass-everywhere-no-proof-its-keeping-covid-bay
I particularly liked this quote from Joseph Allen of Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health: “We spent a lot of time and money focused on hygiene theater”.
A quick search of the CDC’s stance also revealed what I expected–they recommend them to prevent the spread of Covid, even (or especially) in schools to protect students from one another.
Floccina
Jun 9 2021 at 12:18pm
I’d be interested in you doing an post similar to Bryan Caplan’s post on what to believe out of the media (The Sense in Which I Don’t Trust the Media) but for Government. Because for example I’d guess you would believe the GDP numbers are indicative of something, and the employment numbers and unemployment numbers, and crime numbers all coming out of Government sources. And also how strongly and far back do you believe them?
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