The Media And The “Experts”

All the talk about reopening the economy has brought a flood of journalistic counterpoint replete with references to “science” and “experts.” These references sadly seldom look for a balance. There are, after all, lots of “experts,” not all of them medical. Some involve economics and business. By nature each different expertise sets priorities based on its particular focus. These different perpectives often give conflicting advice. Conflict is unavoidable. It is up to those in authority – whether we like or trust or respect them – to balance the risks identified by each group of relevant experts and sometimes differing camps within each area of expertise. Whatever the authorities decide , it will evoke warnings of risk from one expert group or another and probably all of them. There is no way to avoid such warnings. That is life. Journalists who ignore such tradeoffs miss reality either because they are naïve or because they are tendentious. 

Let’s start with the medical experts. They focus on protecting people’s health. For them, the end all and be all is limiting the spread of infection and ensuring that there are facilities to care for the sick. When this emergency first became apparent last March, they worried, not unreasonably, that the infections would spread so fast that the sick would overwhelm hospitals and other medical facilities. Without adequate testing to identify those infected, these experts sought a general quarantine and shutdowns of business to slow the spread of the disease – “flatten the curve” – so that the rate of infection would proceed slowly enough for the existing medical facilities to cope. They readily admitted at the time that the infection ultimately would spread through the population. They did not consider the economic and business consequences at all . Why should they? Business and economics was neither their focus nor their concern.

Another set of experts did consider the economic and business consequences. From the start, those focused on economics and business observed that the shutdowns and quarantines would cost jobs and incomes increasingly so the longer they remained in place.  Even as these experts called attention to these risks, the emergency looked so acute that their voices remained muted and the authorities paid them little attention. But now, as the curve of new infections and hospital admissions has flattened, and it has become increasingly apparent how many millions of jobs the quarantines and lockdowns have cost, policy makers have begun to weigh the warnings of the economic experts against those of the medical experts differently than they did earlier in the emergency. Thought the medical experts continue to decry any easing in social and business interactions as an invitation to increased infections, changed conditions — the loss of millions of jobs at the top of the list — has made it harder for the medical focus to trump (no pun intended) the also legitimate concerns of the experts who focus on people’s livelihoods.

The authorities now are trying, as they should, to balance the concerns of all the relevant experts — the very different risks their very different sciences see. Medical expertise should temper the impulse to ease restrictions aggressively for the sake of the economy, while economic and business expertise should temper the impulse to leave the restrictions in place unaltered. It has become a tradeoff with considered risks on each side. Contrary to so many media stories, science does not stand on only one side of the question (though admittedly only one side wears lab coats).  The authorities are, to rely on the overly technical language so popular in the media these days, involved in solving a massive optimization problem. Even if they get it perfectly right – hardly likely – people will suffer.  It is an unavoidable aspect of existence on this planet. It is a reality that journalists need to recognize.  They certainly understand it when their desire to rush a story leads to the publication of errors.