Further:
I donāt see how they can sustain this. People are dying and local officials are not equipped to deal with this kind of thing on this scale.
And of course the usual suspects are crying āDICTATORSHIPā.
I came across this thread on Twitter from a Dutch reporter.
The thread had a shorter split with this post.
Yeah, seems like things are really reaching a breaking point.
Some good points here, but I will point out a few places where I pretty much disagree with herā¦
Two years ago, it all looked rather different. Despite todayās signs of weariness and frustration, zero-Covid was hailed as an example of the superiority of Chinaās system of government.
No it wasnāt. Even people who thought it was a good and effective strategy didnāt think it illustrated the āsuperiorityā of their system of government (tankies and supporters of authoritarian states not withstanding). More people pointed to New Zealand than to China, who had a zero-covid strategy despite having a democratic system of governance. People really need to get out of the mindset that individual policies are expressions of the goodness or badness of a form of government - a particular policy can be good or bad, taken on itās own merits, even as we put it against the larger context of a particular system of government.
Zero-Covid allowed the government to insist that, unlike western governments, it was keeping its people safe.
Which is, actually a fact. That doesnāt mean that China has a good government along many other axis.
but the emergence of less lethal, but highly transmissible variants, which spread rapidly and often infected without symptoms, made the severe measures ā the lockdowns, interruptions to production, authoritarian controls of every aspect of daily life ā seem out of proportion to the threat.
I think that remains to be seen, but because itās not just about how lethal a particular variant might or might not be, itās also about how allowing a virus to flourish can lead to new variants that are both more virulent and more deadly. That worth taking seriously. The assumption that the virus has reached this point and will no longer mutate is foolish, at best. We understand how viruses work, in generally, and we know that that threat of mutation to a virulent and deadly form is very real. Acting like itās not is just begging from trouble.
It is difficult to reverse policy in any political system, but it is perhaps hardest in a top-down authoritarian model.
Again, Iām not so sure of this statement. We saw how difficult it was just to get some people to wear masks and get vaccinated. Iād argue that there are different challenges in top-down systems and more democratic systems, but they can be equally challenging for different reasons.
Via the OK Doomer Substack articleā¦ just what I needed to refresh my sense of terrorā¦ 
I did rather like that author Jessica Wildfire says āKey takeaway: Covid eats your brain.ā
Thereās got to be a wealth of calibration data in all of this for some mathematical models of collective human behaviourā¦ keys factors to identify, thresholds for breakdown of order. 
Iām a fan of whatās called āstock-flow consistentā macro-economic models, when theyāre well done. They capture a lot of detail the Chicago-school type models miss. Surely someone has done some work like that in the social/political/economic space.
Who, me? Ruthless technocratic tendencies, you say? Why thank youā¦ 
Personally, I think that constantly trying to create mathematical models for human behavior is a bit of a foolās errandā¦ YMMV, of course, but as a historian, I find human behavior to be harder to pin down then other types of phenomenon, which is why I think that economic theory has such a problem trying to ārationallyā describe human activity. We arenāt very rational, generally speaking.
No doubt, but Iām not familiar with it. If anything Iād would suscribe to a more historically grounded set of ideas about human behavior that doesnāt assume that human being are the same across time and space (rational actors, shaped solely by economic motives) but instead looks at the larger structures that shape human behavior, how that changes over time via human interactions, and in turn shapes our activitiesā¦ but maybe Iām coming at everything with my historians hammer?
Anything expecting humans to act predictably fails. Predictably.
I recall hearing some interview on NPR in which people expressed great frustration that economists build their models on the premise that all humans have the same motivations at all times. This was a decade ago or longer, so I wouldnāt worry too much about your viewpoint.
Umā¦ Iām not. But thanks for your āapprovalā I guess?
Sorry, Iāll rephrase. I think your āhistorians hammerā is the correct viewpoint because this criticism of economics has come up at least one other time and probably more.
Thatās where you add a stochastic dimension to the problem for unpredictabilityā¦ 
At the risk of going OT and ending up wearing concrete boots on my next visit to Chicagoā¦ I assert a pet peeve point and make a bold statement:
The Chicago school models require these ārationalā actors for their math to work. Their models donāt flow from facts to math, they took some math from physics then demanded the facts fit.
My argument was not a defense of the Chicago school, though, which I agree with you about, but about the whole practice of attempting to fit complex and disjointed human behavior into an economic model. Iād argue that that is the whole problem in a nutshell. Even Marx was trying to shove human behavior into his model of class warfare. As I said, YMMV, of course, but as a historian, I find human behavior to be much more unpredictable than people looking at the world via an economic lens often allow for.
[ETA] I would argue that this is part of the larger phenomenon described by Karl Polyani in his postwar book The Great Transformation which originally came out in the immediate postwar periodā¦ he sort of argued that the marketization of society in the late 19th and early 20th century contributed to the economic and social disasters of first few decades of the 20th century (wars and the great depression). I think itās an implicit argument for not trying to shoehorn everything into an economic modelā¦
Itās worth a read if youāve never had the chance to read it.
