At a time when all kinds of people are play-acting as epidemiologists, some social scientists are actually applying their core competencies to better understand the COVID-19 crisis. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about how politics shapes public health.

At a time when all kinds of people are play-acting as epidemiologists, some social scientists are actually applying their core competencies to better understand the COVID-19 crisis. Political scientists Shana Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas Pepinsky ran a national survey [[link removed]] in the early stages of COVID-19 in the United States to investigate the relationship between partisanship and how people are responding to the pandemic. They found that, in the March 20-23 survey period, political affiliation was the single most consistent predictor of concern about the virus and willingness to follow social distancing guidelines, with self-described Democrats much more engaged with the growing crisis than others. Digging further [[link removed]] into the data, it turns out that having COVID-19 cases in a respondent’s county makes them more likely to take the virus seriously, but even that is a relatively weak effect compared to partisan affiliation.

WHERE DISTANCE ISN’T AN OPTION

COVID-19 is scariest for people who are physically unable to implement any real form of social distancing. Among the people who have to trust their health to dumb luck in a pandemic are residents of refugee camps who are restricted in their movements. Experts worry [[link removed]]that COVID-19 could spread rapidly if it enters major refugee centers.

Among other problems, refugee medical facilities are chronically under-resourced. In the coastal Bangladeshi town of Cox’s Bazar, for example, near where more than 1 million Rohingya refugees live, the United Nations hopes to expand intensive care unit capacity to 10 beds.

One Red Cross worker in Cox’s Bazar emphasized that if even a single COVID-19 case entered the refugee community there, the spread of the virus would be “uncontrollable.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Absent UNSC

UN Secretary-General António Guterres made headlines last week by calling for a global cease-fire in order to coordinate response to COVID-19. Some Security Council member countries have joined in that call, but it is beginning to seem [[link removed]] like an appeal to the organization’s symbolic power to cover up the fact that the Council has offered no practical response to the pandemic. Unlike during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, when the UN became a major conduit of resources to help West Africans fight the virus, the Security Council has been effectively silent on COVID-19.

Part of the problem is practical — the Council’s usual meeting place is in New York City, a major COVID-19 hot spot. Much of the Council’s deliberations since the crisis began have involved finding a secure way to meet online, as apparently calling into Zoom meetings wearing a suit jacket and sweatpants won’t cut it.

A larger problem is that China and the US, veto-holding permanent Council members, are engaged in a high-stakes blame game about who is responsible for COVID-19’s spread that is preventing business from being done. Continuing its strategy [[link removed]] from the G-7, the Trump administration continues to insist that COVID-19 be referred to as “Wuhan Virus” in all international resolutions.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Talking to People Like People: Part 2

Last time on Deep Dive, we learned about the game theory behind experts’ unwillingness to admit when they don’t know the answer to a complex policy question. This week, we’ll look at the opposite question: Why do some legitimate experts — with real information about how a crisis may unfold — choose not to offer predictions about that crisis even while quacks with no real information make grand pronouncements?

Evaluating predictions is a tricky game. For one thing, predictions are usually made using private information — that is, information that’s inaccessible to people trying to evaluate the predictions. For another, it’s impossible to know if the prediction will be accurate until events actually take place, at which point the value of the prediction drops to zero because the events predicted are in the past. That makes it very easy for predictors to lie and claim to have access to private information when actually they’re just guessing. To believe a prediction has value, we have to believe that the predictor has access to some useful private information before we actually have the ability to tell whether that’s true.

One way to think about that belief in the predictor’s access to private information is as the predictor’s reputation. If someone claiming to be an expert has a strong reputation within their field, we’re more likely to think they have insights into that field that we lack. Of course, in that environment, reputation is a crucial resource, to be guarded jealously. As it turns out, the need to protect reputation makes for some strange incentives around prediction-making for top experts.

Economists Aleksei Smirnov and Igor Starkov published a paper [[link removed]]late last year examining how subject matter experts protect their reputations when making predictions. They made a game-theoretic model that reflects how difficult it is for observers to tell people with real insights — who Smirnov and Starkov call “seers” — from people who are taking a shot in the dark and hoping to be proved rights — “quacks,” in Smirnov and Starkov’s parlance.

In the long run, the quacks get punished. Their predictions tend to be wrong and observers notice that. In the short run, however, differentiating seers and quacks is impossible, unless the quacks decide to answer [[link removed]] Isaac Chotiner’s phone calls. As a result, anyone who makes any kind of prediction sees a short-term hit to their reputation. If a prediction is proved right then that predictor recovers their reputation and then some after the fact, but for any prediction the short run reputational cost is unavoidable. The only reliable way to win in the short run, therefore, is not to play. In Smirnov and Starkov’s model, experts who refuse to make any predictions see their reputations gradually grow -- they pay no cost for sitting a given situation out.

Of course, if you can make reputational gains by doing nothing, why does anyone ever make a prediction? The answer, according to Smirnov and Starkov, is that in order for there to be a robust prediction market, the reward for being the highest-rated predictor has to be substantial enough for a quack to want to risk their reputation by guessing at it. Like, shaping-national-pandemic-response-strategy substantial [[link removed]].

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Halima Gikandi reported [[link removed]] on the threat COVID-19 poses to people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. On Tuesday, ICE announced the first confirmed case in one of its detention facilities, but the agency has taken few measures to protect the tens of thousands of immigrants in its custody. Detainees report overcrowding, soap shortages, and lack of masks and gloves for inmates, all of which increase the risk of COVID-19 spreading quickly in ICE facilities.

Kelsey Atherton traced [[link removed]] the history of comorbidity between disease and war. Illness often follows the destruction wrought by conflict — immiseration loves company — but some commanders have used disease as a weapon. In ancient sieges, early practitioners of biological warfare introduced diseases into cities hemmed in by enemies at the gates, hoping to sap defenses. Today, the Trump administration has increased sanctions against COVID-19-ravaged Iran and trumpeted the virus’s spread there as a victory in the administration’s ongoing attempt to besiege the country.

Durrie Buscaren reviewed [[link removed]] the toll COVID-19 has taken in Iran, where the virus has reached a scale seen only in Wuhan, China, northern Italy, and New York City. At least 2,234 died of COVID-19 in Iran as of Friday, and American sanctions are limiting the government’s ability to bring protective equipment and medical supplies into the country. An Iranian academic study predicts the virus may kill 3.5 million Iranians by the summer, which would be three times the number who died in the devastating Iran-Iraq war four decades ago.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach have a fascinating new paper [[link removed]]out demonstrating that union membership reduces racial resentment among white workers. It’s worth a read, but it makes Well Played because of the dance party [[link removed]] the Grumbach clan held when it got accepted into the American Journal of Political Science.

How many space trees do you need to make a space forest? Presumably more than one [[link removed]].

This [[link removed]] is what Gen-Z survivalism looks like.

Never let it be said that Hollywood lacks [[link removed]] historical sensitivity.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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