Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…I understand why they didn't initially want to pursue this project. I still don't understand why after everything went down, it isn’t more of a news item that this was a problem that was not solved? We're memory-holing a lot of things that happened in the pandemic. I wish we wouldn't. It’s partly because of political incentives and because we're approaching an election year. It’s also because of the quirky way that American parties and candidates bounce off each other. It's in no one's real incentive to say, "okay, I would like to relitigate the mask issue for a moment." We told people that masks don't block airborne viruses. We were quite confident of that. The entire news media backed us up on it. Then we 180’d a month later. No one wants to relitigate that. No one wants to relitigate that California imposed redlining in the provision of medical care. That was wrong and evil. However, the party that was pro-redlining does not normally like saying that it is pro-redlining. The other party does not really consider that a hugely salient issue. There are no debates and no one is asking Governor Newsom, "you got on TV and said that you were doing geofencing for the provision of medical care. Geofencing in that context was the same as redlining. Can you explain your support for redlining?" No one has asked Newsom that question. Maybe someone should. We're surrounded by the effects of incentives and the effects of iterated games. Sometimes they don't play out the way we would ideally like them to play out. I still don't feel like I really understand. Is it that everybody has blood on their hands? That’s still confusing. If you lost a war, you don’t just brush it aside. The generals would have to come up in front of Congress and be like, "what happened? why didn't we get that battlefield?" Actually, we just lost a war. Maybe that didn't happen.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.