My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein – who has been a rock of reason within the swirl of what my friend Lyle Albaugh now calls Covid Derangement Syndrome – asked me to post the following. I do so very agreeably. (It is not incidental, I think, that Dan lives part of the year in Sweden and was there for the first few months of the global hysteria.)
Prediction: Covid Insanity Will Decline After the Election
By Daniel B. Klein
Back in July I suggested that much of the Covid-policy hysteria, propaganda, and over-reaction in the United States was a strategy – if only a subconscious strategy. By wrecking the economy and making people miserable, propagandists and lockdowners would talk voters into blaming President Trump and vote him out.
In September I doubled-down on the idea.
Now I’ll triple-down: I predict that—regardless of the outcome of the election—Covid-policy discourse in leftist media will change not long after the election. The Covid propaganda will start to fade away. It won’t happen over-night, but, I predict, that from, say, November 20 the insanity will begin to recede and that thinking and policy will start going back to normal. The main impetus of the propaganda and wreckage will have passed.
By December 1 we should be able to perceive whether such a trend had started from November 20. Let’s meet again on December 1 and see how my prediction has turned out!
