Thread by @ezraklein

I’m going to back a few days in Discourse Time, and say something I think has been missed the Joe Rogan/Covid mess (I realize there are now other messes).

Once you’re here, all the answers are bad. They’re all bad because they all harm the thing you’re trying to protect: Trust.

Having one of the most popular podcasters in the world become a platform for vaccine misinformation?

That’s bad, for obvious reasons.

But bringing more attention to that misinformation, and making those sympathetic to him feel persecuted and censored?

Also bad! You’re alienating and angering the exact people you need to reach.

It’s a Kobayashi Maru.

Rogan was an apt backdrop for my column this week, about a new Lancet paper that tries to untangle what actually predicted country-by-country coronavirus outcomes. nytimes.com/2022/02/06/opi…

Most things don’t!

You can’t predict much with population density, GDP, pandemic preparedness ratings from 2019, health system capacity, universal health care coverage, smoking, exposure to SARS and MERS, air pollution…

So what works? First, age. That explains a lot. But you can’t do much about age.

Second: Measures of social and institutional trust.

Policy lies downstream of society. Mandates are not self-executing; to work, policies need to be followed, guidance needs to be believed. Public health is rooted in the soil of trust. That soil has thinned in America.

The Biden team has made their mistakes. But the context for their administration is a Republican Party divided over the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and where fighting and sabotaging their covid response is the understood path to 2024.

And the broader context is that America has really fallen on measures of trust.

Our trust in government is extremely low, fragile-state low. Our trust in each other is higher, but falling. Our informational commons are fractured and angry.

That helps explain why America led the world on pandemic preparedness measures in 2019 and then failed so badly when faced with an actual pandemic.

Once you’re in as low-trust, high-dysfunction, high-polarization environment, all policy choices degrade.

Take vaccine mandates. They wrap vaccines in debates over personal freedom and bodily autonomy. They also kinda of work, when all else fails.

It's a tradeoff.

Denmark has 81% vaccine coverage, and no mandate.

That’s what you want: A society where you don’t need a vaccine mandate in the first place!

To need a vaccine mandate is to need a policy that will further fracture society. It's a bad choice to be faced with.

We often debate policy as if it will be smoothly implemented and followed. I’m more guilty of this than most.

But we have to talk about the problem we actually have: What does good pandemic policy look like for a low-trust, high-dysfunction society?

I'll loop this back to Rogan: I think he should've been treated as a target for persuasion, not punishment, going a ways back.

(And many did this! Props here to @SanjayGuptaCNN, who tried exactly that recently, but Rogan was too angry at CNN to treat that conversation normally.)

The useful push with Rogan — the one that Spotify could and perhaps has shoved him on, as Rogan has now pledged to do this — would've been for him to do what he says he does, and have on the most credible, informed voices on the topics he's exploring.

It may be too late.

I suspect Rogan is personally pretty angry and polarized, so I'm not sure he's still persuadable. Or maybe he never was. Or maybe he actually is. I won't pretend to know.

I think a policy targeting trust would've been trying, in a friendly and patient and organized way, to influence him for a long time.

And that would've meant becoming more friendly and more patient and more organized as he flirted with bad ideas.

And it would've been hard and maybe impossible to win him over. I'm not saying any of this would have worked.

But treating him as an enemy definitely failed. And if you think the bad ideas he's spreading matter, then that matters. It's a failure worth thinking about.

The Rogan problem is just a miniature version of our broad social problem here: The thing we need to be targeting is trust and persuasion. And policy is a very crude tool through which to do it.

By the time you're solving a trust problem through policy, you're in bad shape. And sometimes that's just reality. But the lesson of the past few years is we need to take trust and messengers and solidarity as our first priority.

And that kind of work is hard and emotionally unsatisfying. It means coalitions you don't want to make and patient, generous courting of people you think are really damaging society. This kind of politics is really hard. But there's no obvious alternative to it.

Here's more on the research and theory of all this: nytimes.com/2022/02/06/opi…