Sheilagh Ogilvie: evaluation

Transcript context

…What were they better at? How did that play out? They were better in lots of ways. They were also not so good in a couple of ways. They were better in knowing what the local preference was of the cost-benefit analysis between economic effects and epidemiological effects. They were good at liaising with informal community-level neighborly effects, so monitoring of neighbors by one another, altruism among neighbors, and so on. They were really highly informed about who was keeping the well clean, who was getting variolated or vaccinated — the sharp-eyed neighbor, the curtain-twitching effect. They were highly informed. It probably wasn’t that fun if you were not keeping your latrine clean and you weren’t getting vaccinated, but your neighbors were watching you. They were pretty good at — at least in some parts of Europe — running a local-level welfare system where they could observe which villagers were going through difficulties and provide them with some welfare support that would enable them to observe lockdown or get variolated, or would provide them with some food if they needed to quarantine. That often works well on the local level because the deserving poor are very easily identified locally. So, I’m talking up local government. The problem is that pandemics, epidemics often spill out beyond the village walls. When that was the case, you actually sometimes needed higher levels of government to bang a few local heads together because the problem with villages and small towns is that they only care about what’s going on inside the community. Sometimes we know there are cross-border externalities. None of us are safe until we’re all safe. Looking at the spillover effects beyond the local community, I think having higher levels of government to do a bit of local head banging was a useful thing. But on the whole, it was local governments that did most of the heavy lifting, and the central government, at best, was just permitting the local government to do its thing rather than actually taking initiatives. Now, you were living in England during the COVID pandemic, right?…

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