What will we have learnt from the coronavirus outbreak?

When this coronavirus pandemic will finally be receding, after having taken its toll upon the human race, what will we have learned? What steps should we take once the ashes settle, to prevent global disasters in the future?

The easy answer would be: fire the leaders who were slow to react, fire the pundits who said that there was no need for overreacting to the first initial deaths, write software which can sense outbreaks faster, put in place easy-to-activate systems for quarantine, have larger stocks of masks, react more swiftly, and so on.

But that’s an easy answer which would not change much. Except for China and a few others, the leaders who were in charge at the beginning of 2020 were already new leaders, in most cases. The outbreak was detected early. The easy-to-activate systems for screening were already in place. Most countries already kept stocks of masks. We did react fast (relatively), but the epidemic spread faster. And so on.

The problem was not the leaders we had in times of crisis, but the incentives weighing on them. The problem was not the systems we had in place, but the incentives weighing on the centralized systems delaying their activation. The problem was not detecting the outbreak early, but sharing the information and taking action. The problem wasn’t in the availability of masks, but in the willingness of people to wear them. And so on.

We do not need better leaders and better processes. These are nice-to-haves, but are not game-changers. We need better systems who do not need better leaders and better processes.ShareCopy

(A less connected world would also help, but I assume this option is not on the table, realistically.)

The incentive for people in leadership positions, especially those in globally-relevant positions, is to avoid false positives and delay reaction until the last moment possible. It is hard to find leaders who would be swift in reacting to an emergency. It is impossible to find them reliably enough to trust them with our lives. It’s wiser to create systems which do not have to wait on a leader sitting miles away to give the green light to respond to an emergency.

As Joe Norman wrote, “the theory that you need central government because they can react quickly to crisis has been debunked.” We need local governments, who are faster and more incentivized to react quickly and proactively to crises. We need local governments, small enough so that we can have a lot of them, so that if one is slow, too bad for its constituents, but not for everyone else.

The usual counterargument is: “central governments are efficient”. However:

Centralization is only efficient when observed from the center, be it its physical center (the capital), its political center (those running for central elections), its societal center or its professional center.ShareCopy