Georgetown's COVID-19 Compact and My Response

UPDATE 2: I learned recently that the Faculty Senate also objected to this document (back on July 14 before the rest of us saw it) for the same reasons, and as a result, it is likely that it will be revised.

UPDATE: Upon further reading, I realized that the compact, as written forbids me from hugging my kids or having sex with my spouse this year (if I want to come to campus) since it literally says I must stay 6' away from them. In this case, though, I presume on their behalf this is merely improper wording. 

N.B.: I will delete this post if our policies are amended.

Georgetown sent all faculty, staff, and students a "compact" yesterday, which we are expected to sign. 

Today I sent our provost the following email:

Dear Provost Groves,

As a scholar of the political economy of academic decision-making (e.g., Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, Oxford University Press 2019), and as someone who has published in a peer-reviewed journal on policy failures regarding COVID-19 I was eager to see what our campus compact would be this fall.

I assume that the document was carefully written, the language is intentional, and that the implications are intended. As it stands, the compact has a number of disturbing features.

For instance, consider this language: 

 Recognizing this responsibility, in order to be present on any university-owned, managed or controlled properties (“Campus”), and, if a student, to live in the neighborhoods of Georgetown, Burleith, or Foxhall, (the “Neighborhoods”),  I will adhere to the terms of this Community Compact for the 2020-2021 academic year.

I specifically commit to the following:

….8.  Practicing good personal hygiene consistent with the COVID-19 Health and Safety Measures, including:

• 

1. maintaining 6’ of physical distancing between myself and any other person,

2. frequent hand washing for twenty seconds,

3. frequent use of hand sanitizers, and

        4. wearing a face covering over my nose and mouth at all times except when I am alone in a room, when eating, when in my personal residence without guests, or when exercising outdoors with at  least 6’ of physical distancing; [emphasis added]

As written, if students or I intend to come to campus, then this document implies (as in “deductively implies”):

1. In order to sit outside on my own deck to read a book, I agree to wear a face mask. (Perhaps we understand “in my personal residence” to include “outside on one’s own property.")

2. If I decide, at long last, to visit family members or allow them to visit me at Thanksgiving or Christmas—family members I haven’t seen this entire year—that they and I must wear face masks the entire time they are in my house, unless we are each alone in separate rooms. This holds even for Thanksgiving, despite the fact that the earliest I would be on campus would be over a month later and I would no longer be able to spread the disease at that point.

3. Any of our students living on or near campus cannot kiss their significant others this year, unless they also live together. 

4. If I sit outside on an empty park bench in my neighborhood park, I must wear a mask.

And so on. 

These are extremely strict measures not, as far as I can tell, supported by the academic literature on the risks of COVID-19, though perhaps we are forced to adopt such measures by DC regulations. They are certainly far stricter than the legal requirements I face or have faced as a resident of Virginia.

Further, the document suggests that students, staff, and faculty agree that you can unilaterally change the compact at any time, and that they pre-consent to whatever changes you later make. I don’t know if this document qualifies as a contract in some legal sense, but in general, in legal contracts, even when there is language to the contrary, parties do not acquire the right to unilaterally revise the conditions.

As it stands, then, the document requires faculty, staff, and students to either A) abide by extremely strict rules or B) lie about their intended compliance with such rules. 

I suspect the overwhelming majority of our students will choose B, in part because they will feel that they are under duress. They will sign the document and pledge to follow those rules, but will in fact deviate from them and know they will do so ahead of time. For instance, they will have friends over to their apartments from time to time. They will not abstain from, say, kissing a significant other they don’t live with. When they go home for Thanksgiving, they will not wear a mask the entire time nana visits. 

Further, I suspect it is not cynical to suggest that whoever drafted this document is knows that students who sign this will not intend to comply strictly with the document. It appears we are knowingly asking students (and others) who wish to be on campus to make false promises. 

I was on the fence about teaching in person this year. I am 40-years-old, have no co-morbidities, and on the best estimates, have an expected IFR of maybe 0.01%. I am one of the faculty least at risk. But as it stands, I will have to choose to teach online and avoid campus, because if my in-laws decide to visit on Thanksgiving break (after 11 months of all us practicing radical social distancing), I will have to have agreed that we must all wear masks except when alone in our individual rooms.

Jason Brennan

Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor
Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy
McDonough School of Business
Georgetown University

Perverse Incentives Created Our Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System

Chris Surprenant and I have the lead essay this month on a Cato Unbound symposium on why the US criminal justice is so terrible. It draws from our book Injustice for All. 

Abstract of the symposium:

We all know that the United States imprisons many more people per capita than otherfree countries. But why? Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians all have their favored theories, but this month’s lead authors, Chris W. Surprenant and Jason Brennan, argue that none of them captures the whole story. Here to discuss with them this month are Clark Neily, the Cato Institute’s Vice President for Criminal Justice; and John Malcolm, the Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for the Institute for Constitutional Government and Director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies. The conversation will continue through the end of the month, and comments on posts are open to readers during the same time period.

Two Worlds on One Street: Guest Post by John Hasnas

The following is a guest post by John Hasnas, Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy, and by courtesy, Professor of Law, at Georgetown University.

One of the curses of too much education is that you cannot just experience life as it is, but constantly see what is going on around you as concrete illustrations of abstract principles.

I am fortunate enough to live in a community of homes that surrounds a lake, Lake Barcroft, near Bailey's Crossroads in Northern Virginia. Not far down the street from us is one of the beaches the homeowner's association maintains where residents can swim in the summer. At the other end of the street, just across the road from the Lake Barcroft community is a private swim club with two pools where member families can swim, dive, and play during the summer months.

The swim club is governed by the state of Virginia's plan to contain the coronavirus. Virginia is currently moving from Phase 2 to Phase 3 of this plan. This requires users to make reservations in advance to use the facility. Members can sign up for “Kids Fun”–using the pools while remaining 10 feet away from others, “Lounging only”–sitting in the sun in open areas 6 feet away from others, “Diving”, and “Lap Swimming”. Members may use the pool for 45 minutes after which they must leave while the facilities are cleaned before the next group is admitted for their 45 minutes. Members may sign up only once per day, must wear masks while waiting in line 6 feet apart to enter the club, answer questions about their health status as they check in, and use hand sanitizer upon entering.

The swim club is a sad and quiet place. Perhaps unsurprisingly no one signs up for the cruelly- named Kids Fun or for lounging. The pool is used almost exclusively by adults coming to swim laps for their 45 minutes and go home.

In contrast, the beach is governed only by the residents' voluntary behavior. The beach is full of families happily playing in the sand and swimming. They typically sit in family groups separated from other family groups, but kids throw frisbees and footballs back and forth and interact with other children. There are also many teenagers at the beach, playing spikeball, taking out paddle boards and floats, and generally hanging out together. None of the families or teenagers wear masks, but the general tenor of interaction is more restrained than it typically is in summer. A few older residents are there also, usually wearing masks and sitting away from everyone else.

The beach is a happy and cheerfully noisy place. People apparently believe that the risk of transmitting the virus is greatly reduced outdoors, and that only limited restrictions on their activities are necessary to prevent the spread of the infection. They are apparently correct because the beaches have been open since memorial day and there have been no increases in local coronavirus infection rates.

As a lap swimmer at the pool, I move between the sad, quiet world of the swim club and the happy, noisy world of the beach. Unable to prevent my over-educated mind from fleeing to abstractions, I see the two ends of my street as representing the difference between central planning and spontaneous order.

The swim club is fighting the virus under a one-size-fits-all mandate from the state's central

planning agency. Its goal is to suppress the spread of the virus. It has little to no incentive to run any risk of increased infection merely so that citizens can enjoy themselves. Using the pool reminds me of going through a TSA checkpoint and leaves the impression of just being more security theater.

The beach is fighting the virus on the basis of individual decisions as to how to balance the risk of infection against the other things that make life worthwhile. This approach requires people to learn by trial and error how to adjust their conduct to the new conditions. It carries a both greater risk of spreading the infection and a better prospect of obtaining other values that make life worth living.

Going to the beach makes me smile both because it is nice to see families and teenagers having fun and because I feel like I am part of a grand experiment to figure out how to live with a new risk without being controlled by politicians or scolded by their rabid supporters. For most people the pleasant experience would be enough. But because I am a pointy-headed intellectual, I characterized myself as having a real Hayekian experience.

Would Democracy Benefit from More Competent Voters? You Already Believe It

Nearly all voters are ignorant, irrational nationalists; most are innocent of ideology and simply parrot and follow what others in their identity-group do.

I think this matters--it partly explains why democracies choose bad policies. Every major democracy routinely does stupid and evil things; all of them fall very far short of justice, though they usually outperform dictatorships. 

When I give talks on this, students and even some professors argue that it doesn't matter if most voters are ignorant and irrational. We make it up on volume. The mechanisms of representative democracy sufficiently check voter irrationality. Representatives and the technocratic bureaucracies they've empowered produce good policy, while voters put just enough of a check on leaders to force them to serve the public interest, more or less.

They're not entirely wrong. It may well be that democracies work so well in part because they are not that democratic; elites don't always cater to the evil, rotten ideas of the masses. 

However, even if you think that's part of the story, we can test to see just how strongly you believe that.

1. Imagine I have a magic wand. When I wave it, it will make nearly all voters even more ignorant, irrational, and tribalistic. Would it be a bad thing to wave it? Would it hurt democratic performance? Would it lead to more injustice and worse outcomes? When I ask critics these questions, basically all of them say yes. 

2. Imagine I have a second magic wand. When I wave it, it will significantly reduce voters' ignorance and irrationality; it will make them much better informed about both basic political facts and whatever theories are needed to understand those facts, about how to predict what policies will do, and so on. It will reduce their cognitive biases by a significant degree. Would it be a good thing to wave it? Would it help democratic performance? Would it lead to more justice and better outcomes? When I ask critics these questions, basically all of them say yes.

3. Imagine a world like ours, with the same kinds of institutions, but in which voters were completely rational and perfectly well-informed. (I think this is incoherent, because they would then all be cooperative anarchists. But let's put that aside.) Now imagine I show up with a third magic wand. When I wave it, I make all the citizens as ignorant and irrational as the actual living citizens of the US or France today. Would it be horrible to wave that wand? Would it hurt democratic performance, and lead to more injustice and worse outcomes? When I ask critics these questions, basically all say yes.

It's a good question just how much voter ignorance and irrationality matter. Achen and Bartels, Mason, Kinder and Kalmoe, Gilens, and a few others have convinced me it matters less than I thought it did as of, say, 2011 when The Ethics of Voting came out. (That doesn't affect my argument in that book, though, or in Against Democracy.) But it sure seems like matters, and it seems like everyone admits it matters when presented with thought experiments like these.

Public Choice Explains Our Criminal Justice Crisis

The US has an unusually violent and harsh criminal justice system. Chris Surprenant and I wrote Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the US Criminal Justice System to investigate why, and what to do about it.

Early in the book, we say that the most popular explanations offered by the soi-disant progressive left, the right, and even libertarians don't quite work, even though they are partly right. For instance, the Left likes to say the problems are racism and poverty. But racism and poverty have generally been declining, while the criminal justice system has become progressively more punitive and violent. The trendlines go in opposite directions. While racism can explain why blacks are treated worse than whites, it doesn't explain why white Americans are treated so badly compared to whites in other countries. Conservatives say it has to do with the decline of the family leading to increased crime, and that higher-than-normal US criminality explains higher-than-normal harshness. But, again, the trendlines don't match up. Family instability and crime went up, while punitiveness went up much faster, and then instability and crime went down, but then the US system kept getting more punitive, violent, and harsh. Finally, libertarians like to blame the drug war. They're right that the drug war led to certain perversions, such as civil assert forfeiture and the preponderance of SWAT raids. But, as John Pfaff points out, even if all drug and drug-related convictions disappeared, the US would still have an unusually violent and harsh system. 

Instead, Surprenant and I argue that the US are a wide range of unusual rules which create bad incentives, including rules about how prosecutors, DAs, and judges are elected, about how prisons and police are funded, about how taxes are shared, about police unions, and so on, which explain why the US is an outlier. Yes, external shocks such as the war on drugs and rising crime pushed these along (for instance, by inducing misinformed voters to always vote for whoever is toughest on crime), but it's these unique features that best explain what's wrong with the US system.

Here's a recent op-ed at Marketwatch/Yahoo outlining a small portion of the book.

Here's an excerpt:

There are other perverse incentives. Prisons are usually located in rural towns, where they serve as a source of employment for blighted white communities. These towns and their voters lobby states to build more prisons. The prison system is a workfare program employing poor, unskilled white people to guard poor black people.

The U.S. Census counts incarcerated persons as residents of town where they are imprisoned, not the town they lived in before incarceration. In Connecticut, this is responsible for creating nine (majority white) state representative districts that would not meet minimum population requirements but for their prison populations.

As an aside, you'd think that the progressive left would be more congenial to public choice theory. After all, all public choice--despite dishonest nonsense to the contrary from Nancy MacLean or incompetent nonsense from Henry Farrell--is simply the application of economic tools to collective/group action, including in political and non-profit domains. One of its big insights is that when we create structures of power or organizations charged with the goal of promoting some noble good, we  often create perverse or bad incentives which induce normal people to act badly and undermine that good. You would think, given the progressive left's professed values (such as equality), that they would be in love with public choice approaches. After all, it's horrifying if, say, the public school system which is supposed to help promote equal opportunity instead gets hijacked by special interests groups and then perpetuates and enhances inequality. As a progressive, you'd want to carefully measure and eliminate any possible sources of corruption, and you'd want to guard against your threats to your treasured goals. But, no, in general, progressives simply yawn and dismiss the ample empirical evidence that their favored structures aren't working. If I had to speculate, it may be because progressivism is in practice fundamentally an ideology of power--an ideology whose purpose is to justify a technocratic elite reigning over others--and public choice theory speaks truth to power. For instance, as we've seen in Minneapolis and other blue cities and states, the police are largely a client class of Democratic Party, which has enabled and supported their horrible behavior for decades.