Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t even know what to ask next because it’s so obviously outrageous. To me, there's no clear answer about why there isn't more outrage about it. Also, the solution isn't obvious. It’s not clear to me that we’ve learned the lesson for the next pandemic, let alone for a different emergency. For an isomorphic emergency, would our state capacity be better? You mentioned how 100 years ago, we might have been able to deal with this problem better. What changed? America used to do something when the federal government lacked state capacity for something. It’d identify who in civil society or private industry had capacity for this. Then they'd say, "congratulations. By order of the president you're now a colonel in the United States army. What do you need to get it done, sir?" That option was available but not taken. I will play no fights in either of the two administrations. Both individually made terrible decisions. But plausibly, a more enlightened counterfactual administration could have gone to Google and said, "who's your best person for solving this data problem? Will they accept a commission as colonel? Great. Here's an order from the president. Your swearing-in ceremony starts in 30 seconds. You'll present your project plan tomorrow." Again, the successful project plan was actually created by rank amateurs on Discord in a couple of hours. This is just one part of the huge vaccination effort. You could imagine going to Amazon and saying, "hey Amazon, we hear you're good at getting packages from A to B. This package has a really hard challenge. It needs to stay cool during delivery. That’s a totally unsolved problem in material science, right? " Amazon would say, "we literally do that every day." They say, “back in December, people were saying on the news this would be an unprecedented logistics challenge because the vaccine has to be kept at ultra-low temperatures. ” These are the same temperatures at which milk is transported. We already understand cold chain logistics. So Amazon would correct that misperception. They say, “oh you guys seem to know what you’re doing. We have an absence of that here. Congratulations, here’s your colonel uniform in the US military. Now we are going to give you a CSV file everyday. Interface with this other colonel from Google on where this thing needs to go. You get it there on time everytime. If you can’t get it there on time everytime, call the White House and we will find you political cover.” That’s what a functioning system would have done. Granted, the American system is dysfunctional in its own way. We've also underexplored international comparisons in the last couple years. I don't know if any country anywhere, with vastly different political systems, is happy with their outcomes. Some were obviously vastly better than others. There are journals of comparative international politics. Why are those journals writing anything but analysis of who succeeded at what margins and who didn't? What do we learn about about the proper functioning of political systems, civil society, and the United States considered as one hugely complex machine.. That's a really interesting point. I actually asked the Tony Blair Institute. They were recommending different ways of distributing the vaccine to the British government. They made the obvious recommendation that they should give everybody one dose now and then do the second dose later. There were obvious things like this that would have saved lives. The British government didn't do a good job there. No government… it's actually a very interesting question. There are governments all across the world that have very different political systems. They hopefully have different infrastructure already in the mix of this. Why did nobody get this right?…

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