Glen Weyl: belief

Transcript context

…If we look at Singapore, which has done a lot with testing and track and trace, it seems, at least superficially, they did many things right. Now they’re back to having over 900 cases a day [subsequently more], and they’re about the size of Fairfax County and have incredible governance. What did Singapore do wrong, and how will we avoid that same mistake? The truth is I haven’t followed the Singaporean case recently closely enough to figure out what went wrong recently. My impression is that they put too much confidence into a particular digital tracing system, which turned out to get very low take-up, and they pulled back on their manual tracing efforts before there was reason to be confident that they had the ability to pull back on them. There’s also a big problem, which is that manual tracing efforts do a poor job of covering public spaces, and I think that the Singaporeans believed that these Bluetooth-based tracing technologies would cover those public spaces well, and they failed to do so. And they therefore allowed redensification of their public spaces too quickly, and I think that’s something we need to be very careful about. But whether or not we make those exact same mistakes, the fact that such a high-quality government made mistakes, didn’t we really truly fear the United States — with 50 different state governments, a barely competent federal government, if that — will make a lot more, possibly quite different mistakes? How confident are you about how this is going to run?…

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