Back to the Classroom: The Best Teachers are the Students Themselves

During my whole professional life, I always enjoyed teaching. It was part of my life, part of what I am, part of the way I relate with the world. I made mistakes, at times made a fool of myself, sometimes I was ashamed of how poor a teacher I was. But I always did my best. And I think my students, some of them at least, appreciated my effort. And most of them enjoyed being students, just as I did when I was their age. Still today, some of my best friends are people I met when I was in my first year of college.

 

I don't know how it was possible, but a few months of folly have been enough to turn universities into jails, the students as prisoners, and teachers as prison guards. And teaching was transformed into an odious chore. A senseless ritual performed in front of a computer screen, the students reduced to small 2-D squares, as real as the characters of a videogame. 

 

On the media, everywhere the students were insulted, humiliated, insulted, told over and over that they are little more than walking bags full of viruses, plague-spreaders, irresponsible, vicious, self-centered individuals unable to restrain their instincts and harming their elders because of that.

 

This is truly a disaster. Going to school is one of the few remaining chances that the young have to socialize and become functional adults. Chuck Pezeshki said it very well in his latest post on his blog

 

"If we’re to start understanding why the enforced collapse of socialization matters to all students, we’re going to have to come to terms with what we actually do in schools. The answer is not “we smart adults tell students a bunch of stuff, they soak it all in, and they’re far better off for it.” I’ve been teaching (and winning awards) my whole career for teaching, which is really only a modest part of a relatively modest career. The reality is that students learn mostly from each other. And the lessons they learn, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, are mostly about how to relate and listen to each other. We sprinkle the lessons of the venue on top of all of this, of course. But the biggest hunk of everything they learn involves themselves, and their interactions."

 

Here is an excerpt of Chuck's post, but do read all of it. It is an optimistic and inspiring post. Despite the disaster, we must go on and keep teaching and learning.

 

From "The Empathy Guru"

A New Year's Prayer for our Children

Jan 1, 2021

.....

Over and over, we’ve attempted to pin this pandemic on those we disagree with politically. I’ve written about this here. It’s just nuts, and these things have to stop. Or we’re going to end up in a civil war. And that will kill far more young people than COVID ever could.

Where we are missing the boat regarding COVID is the damage that the pandemic has done through destruction of relational growth that really fuels how young minds are formed. Primary- and secondary school-age kids get this from going to school, and there is no real risk, despite the histrionic anecdotes pushed by the media, for school children. Yes, there is a smattering of extremely tragic cases that are part of the pandemic. One of the curiously sociopathic angles discussing COVID is the risk to football players for some version of myocarditis as an after-effect of the pandemic — as if the well-established dangers of smacking each other’s skulls together weren’t enough. There can be no better juxtaposition of how we perceive risk, however. One is a reason to lock down/up our children indefinitely. The latter is merely a continuation of “how we do things around here.” The various lockdowns have been done ostensibly to save the old, though, once again, it’s not clear that any of this anti-socialization has helped them either. In fact — probably not.

When it comes to college-age kids, living in a university community, I hear the constant berating from the elders about irresponsible college kids are, because they continue to socialize. And it’s wild to me that voices of control have been recruited from the student population themselves. I’m not going to name names, because I still have hopes that these young people, though adults, will grow out of the need to please their elders and represent their natural constituencies. There is really functionally no risk to college kids as well. And schools that have opened (I live next to the University of Idaho) have managed to even control spread, as much as it can be contained, than schools that have gone online. Which would, not surprisingly, jibe with the overall statistics — that not much we’ve done, plus or minus, really matters.

If we’re to start understanding why the enforced collapse of socialization matters to all students, we’re going to have to come to terms with what we actually do in schools. The answer is not “we smart adults tell students a bunch of stuff, they soak it all in, and they’re far better off for it.” I’ve been teaching (and winning awards) my whole career for teaching, which is really only a modest part of a relatively modest career. The reality is that students learn mostly from each other. And the lessons they learn, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, are mostly about how to relate and listen to each other. We sprinkle the lessons of the venue on top of all of this, of course. But the biggest hunk of everything they learn involves themselves, and their interactions.

My tagline, since I started my empathy project, has been “as we relate, so we think.” The meaning of this is not simply “if you relate nice, then you think nice.” The stakes are far higher. The DeepOS lesson of all this is that relating to different people, across varying ages, social statuses, and racial/ethnic variations, creates the conditions in the brain for other complex, more discipline-specific information to get slotted. Without that interaction, though, the brains of young people, while not exactly being frozen, do not thrive. And being that all people, in all walks of life, are spread out on a probability distribution for pretty much any issue/concept you can think of, we will decrease a certain percentage of the population’s intellectual and developmental abilities in ways we cannot predict yet. If you say you care about disadvantaged populations in the U.S. this should deeply concern you. Those will be the students whose starting line is moved back once again. My advantaged students, and their parents, can and will find ways around this, and I absolutely do not begrudge them.

But in a time of already-extreme separation between opportunities for rich and poor, those without resources, juggling even furnished iPods in mediocre online classrooms, will be even more screwed. Don’t fool yourself. And they also will not have the more evolved social environments that well-off parents are already creating for their children. Mores the pity.

Just so folks know, I’ll be back in the classroom myself in 18 days, running students through my curricular vehicle, the Industrial Design Clinic. I’m one of the few that’s made that choice. It was not forced on me by my administration. And, no, I haven’t had the vaccine. And yes — when I’m told my number’s up, I’ll get in line, but not before. I already know there are people that need it worse than me. There’s a reason I have 2400 hours of sick leave accumulated through my career– it’s not because I’m unhealthy.

I’m doing it because, even though it will be a difficult classroom environment, it will give my students to get to know their best teachers — each other. We’ll be in masks, we’ll be wiping down tabletops, all things of indeterminate efficacy, but part of whatever set of rules we are told to follow. But we’ll do it together. And I’m looking forward to a great year.

 

Was the Lockdown Effective in Stopping the Spread of the Coronavirus? The Aztec Dilemma

This post was inspired by a post by Chuck Pezeshki on the Aztec civilization, highly recommended as an introduction. 

Scene: Inside the temple at the top of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlán

Characters: the ArchPriest (Master) and the Young Priest (Prentice)


___________________________________________________________________

Prentice: Grand Master, where are you? (walks around, looking). Grand Master?

Grand Master:  Uh...? Prentice, is that you?

Oh... there you are, Master. It's me. Yes. I am sorry to disturb you when you are praying, but...

Hmmmm... I was taking a nap. What's happening?

Master. I need your advice.

Ah...?

See, Master. The time of today's sacrifice is coming.

Yes, of course, I know... I know. We have to start preparing. I must have my obsidian knife somewhere.... By the fangs of of Xipe Totec, it is already getting dark. We have to prepare. . . 

Master, you see, I wanted to tell you something.

Ah...?  Yes, Prentice. We still have some time. But where the Xochiquetzal is my obsidian knife.....

Master, I have a problem....

Oh, yes, here it is. Good old knife... So many hearts I took out with it! But what were you saying, Prentice?

Master, I was thinking of something.

Hmmmm.... Now I need my Mictlantecuhtli mask, should be around. And what have you been thinking?

Master, we always say that if we don't sacrifice a person every day to the sun god Huitzilopochtli, the sun will stop moving in the sky.  

Eh... yes.... that's the point of the ritual of the human sacrifice, of course. You studied that during your training. But where the heck is that mask....

Master, how do we know that?

How do we know what?

That the sun' won't rise tomorrow if we don't perform the sacrifice.

Prentice, you are a smart boy. You know that the god Huitzilopochtli appreciates our sacrifices. And that's proven by the fact that the sun rises every morning. What the great Xochiquetzal have you been thinking? 

Thinking that, well, what if we skip it?

We skip what?

The sacrifice, master.

We skip the sacrifice? Are you mad, Prentice?

No, Master, listen to me. I mean, have we ever missed one of those evening sacrifices?

Prentice, we have always been sacrificing at least one prisoner to the sun God every evening, and the Sun has always risen the morning after. 

That's what I mean, Master. We could skip the sacrifice for once.

Uh.....?

See, I have always been wondering why we never tried that.

Hmm......
 
I mean, of course, I know that if we don't perform the sacrifice, the sun won't rise tomorrow morning. Then, people will be scared. But then we do a few more sacrifices and the sun comes back. Don't you think that the people will be happy? 

 Ah... here is my Mictlantecuhtli mask. I needed it.

Master, what are you thinking of my idea?

Prentice, listen to me. 

Yes, Master?

Prentice, you know that the fact that the sun is coming out every morning is proof that the sacrifices work. 

Yes, Master, I know that. But, actually, you see, I thought that, maybe, we could do a test. . .

Prentice. I always said you were a good boy. Now, suppose we don't sacrifice tonight, as you propose. What if the sun comes up anyway tomorrow morning?

Master, that cannot be. The sun god will be awfully angry and. . . .

Just suppose that, you idiot!

Ah.... well, Master. But you taught me. . .

Never mind what I taught you, you dumbfuck moron. You know what would happen. The people of Tenochtitlán would climb this stupid pyramid, then cut our hearts out and eat them. 

Master, but I am sure that the god Huitzilopochtl wouldn't push the sun out if we don't perform the sacrifice.

Sure, Prentice, sure. But now, I have a good idea. I go to organize the sacrifice for tonight. You stay here until I come back.

Master, but I should help you with the preparations...

Stay here, I said.

Master, but why....?

Just stay here and wait, Prentice. And thanks for volunteering for tonight's sacrifice.

Three months later, Florence restarts. But not quite

The owners of a shoe repair shop in Florence (*). In this picture, taken just after the end of the coronavirus lockdown, they are preparing to reopen their shop. They look happy, even euphoric. Time will tell if that optimism was justified.

The epidemic is almost over in Italy. After almost three painful months of lockdown and the loss of about 30.000 lives, the daily number of victims of the coronavirus is slowly dwindling to zero. In a couple of weeks at most, the epidemic will be completely gone. It is time to restart, but the damage has been terrible.

The lockdown is over and the Florentines are back, walking in the streets, wearing face masks, but free to go wherever they want, provided that they don't form groups ("assembramenti"). A few tourists can be seen, slowly walking around, a little bewildered. Below, you see a picture of a few days ago with two lone tourists taking a picture of the "Porcellino" (Wild Boar) (the boar looks a little bewildered, too.).
 

Many shops have reopened, but not all of them -- maybe 30% are still closed. For what I could see this morning downtown, all the open shops are empty of customers. The restaurants also look empty. The buses are nearly empty, too. Here is a picture taken this morning, with me and my wife the only passengers of a bus that used to be packed full before the epidemic. Note the signs saying "You cannot sit here!" They don't seem to be necessary, given the situation.

To pass to you some idea of the somber atmosphere in Florence these days, here are two fragments of conversations I had or witnessed in the street. Maybe these people are too pessimistic, but I have a feeling that they have correctly evaluated the situation.

___________________________

First, an exchange I overheard a few days ago while waiting in line at the entrance of a supermarket. I don't know the names of the protagonists, two men in their 50s. The one who said he had a shop I recognized later standing at the entrance of a small clothing shop in Via Romana, in Florence. I am reporting from memory, but the gist of what they said is there


 - Hello. How have you been doing? I haven't seen you around, recently.

- Oh, nice to see you! Of course you didn't see me! I was at home, like everybody else.

- Yeah, I was at home, too. But are you reopening the shop? I saw it is still closed.

-  Yes, it is still closed, but I am reopening on Monday.

- That's good, right?

- Not so good, really.

- Why?

- What do you think I can sell? There are no more tourists.

- Well, you didn't sell just to tourists. They don't come here so often.

- No, but you see. Someone from Spain would come and buy something. Then someone from America would come and buy something. And so on. See? It made the difference.

- I see....

- So, I am opening yes. But I am just selling off the stock I have. Then I'll close for good. In a month or two, I think.

- Really? Are you sure?

- How do you think I can pay the rent and the taxes? And for renewing the stock?

- Well, I think the government will help us.

- Yeah, sure.

__________________________________________________________

Now, a conversation I had this morning with a man who had a kiosk selling used books downtown. Again, it is reported from memory, but I tried to reproduce the sense and the tone of what I was told.


See? This kiosk has been around for a long while. Really long, see, it was here during the war already. The woman who had started this business sold the license in 1946. Oh, yes, and I have been selling books here for a long time. Sure, I am 66 now. Last year I thought I could retire, but then I decided I could keep going for a little longer. But they have been ruining me. First, there used to be an antique market right behind the kiosk, you know that, and then the city decided to send them away -- not elegant enough for the city of Florence. Sure. Before, people would visit the market and then stop here and buy books -- I had some good books, even antique ones. I was known, people knew that I had those books. I still have a few. But the antique market is gone -- they sent it somewhere out of town. Yes, it was not elegant enough for here, they said. They call it "decorum" of the city. Sure, and the people of the market are not selling anything anymore, where they are now. And I wasn't selling anything, either. Well, a little I was still selling. Not much, but a little. But then this. I have been forced to close down for three months. And I told them that I couldn't pay the license and the tax. And they say, fine, you don't need to pay for three months. Then you have to restart paying, and that's final. And if you don't pay, they said, you bring back your license to us and we'll give you a compensation of Eur 600, and that's it. And good riddance. You understand? They are happy that I close. Perfectly happy. A kiosk is not elegant enough for the decorum of the city, they say. Maybe they think that when tourists see my kiosk they run away screaming. Tourists like fancy shops only. And I have to pay 54 Euro per day -- yes, 54 euros in taxes and fees to the city. And I have to sell books for more than that if I have to eat. And to buy more books to sell, otherwise, what am I going to sell? Don't you see? There is no way. Nobody walking around, nobody buying anything, no tourists, they have gone. I should have retired last year, but I couldn't have imagined.... how could I have imagined this? And the city helping us? Ha! The mayor says he is furious, yeah, sure, he said that. I read it in the newspaper. He said he is furious because the central government didn't give him any money for the epidemic. That's what he said. And what should I say, myself? If the mayor is furious, how about me? I have been giving money to the mayor for 30 years and the mayor now is furious because he has no money to give to me. Aw.... even if he got some money from the government, I am sure he won't give any money to me or to the people who have shops and who need money. Like me, that's it. And so I'll be closing down. I'll be just selling the books I have and then good riddance. This square will be empty: no antique market no kiosks, nothing. I figure they'll be happy. It is what they wanted all along, decorum, yes. An empty square, and that's it. 


(*) The owners of the Calzoleria Leonardo Tozzi in Via Romana were kind enough to give me permission to publish the photo you see at the beginning of this post. If you happen to be in Florence, and you need a shoe repair job, you can find them in Via Romana 135r, just a few steps from the clothing shop mentioned in the first conversation reported in this shop

The downfall of 'Professor Lockdown': triumphs and failures of science based policies

Scientists normally think that a scientific theory can be good or bad independently of the moral status of the person who proposes it. But in politics, the messenger can be blamed. That was the probable reason for the downfall of Dr. Neil Ferguson, nicknamed "Professor Lockdown," whose moral position was destroyed by a sex scandal. For most scientists, Dr, Ferguson's personal misbehavior has no relevance to the validity of his models, but for politicians and for the public, it does. A lot.

You all read the story of the downfall of Professor Neil Ferguson, aka "Professor Lockdown," trashed worldwide in the media for having had his lover, Ms. Antonia Staats, visiting him during the lockdown period that he himself had recommended for everybody else. It was a blessing for tabloids and there is no doubt that Dr. Ferguson deserved much of the scorn and the ridicule that was poured on him. Yet, there are some elements in this story that make it different from an ordinary story of philandering.

Let's review what we know: it seems that Ms. Staats and Dr. Ferguson met first over an internet site and then it was Staats who went to visit Ferguson during the lockdown period at his home in London, and the same Staats who told the story to friends who, in turn, diffused it around. Ferguson didn't even try to deny the media reports, and he immediately apologized and resigned from his post of government advisor.

I don't know about you, but. to me, all this looks like a trap, sounds like a trap, even smells like a trap. So, it probably was a trap. Ferguson fell head first into it and he was neatly skewered.

Of course, I am not the only one who smelled the rat: there have been plenty of speculations about who decided to push Dr. Ferguson under the bullet train, and why. Some say that it was because the British government needed to distract the public from bad news about the epidemic. Others think of a disagreement between the government and Ferguson. And when a government decides that a scientist is a nuisance, you know what happens (think of the case of Robert Oppenheimer in the 1950s)

Whatever the case, we are not talking here about a despicable professor who flouted a few moral rules. It is all about the political struggle that underlies the coronavirus story. It was Ferguson who told the UK government that they were facing a stark choice: either to accept a huge number of victims, maybe half a million of them, or to wreck the UK economy. The government chose the second strategy, probably thinking it was the least damaging one. Several other European governments, for instance the Italian one, patterned their response on the basis of the views expressed by Ferguson.

And here we have the interesting point: going into lockdown was one of the very few cases of a major policy choice made on the basis of a scientific model, and I mean a really major choice.  Governments do enact laws on the basis of scientific data, but normally it is a matter of gradual changes that don't change people's lives. Say, there are laws regulating the exhaust emissions of private cars, but no laws (up to now) forcing people to walk. The lockdown was also a rare case of a policy derived not from past data but from a predictive model of the future. It was a huge novelty because, normally, politicians ignore scientists' predictions: they tend to react rather than "pro-act". 

The problem, here, is that science and politics use different languages to model reality. Science speaks in terms of data, politics uses narrative. There follows that if you want to use a scientific model for political purposes, you must translate it into a different language: the language of politics. That means turning quantitative models into narratives. And there lies the problem. A big, large, huge, humungous problem: there is no "Google Translate" service that smoothly turns scientific results into policy choices. When people speak different languages they are bound to misunderstand each other, sometimes with disastrous results.  

So, Dr. Ferguson's recommendations were translated into a narrative and the lockdown became a moral tale of good and bad behavior. People were told that if they didn't follow the lockdown rules, they were not just breaking the law, they were evil for putting the life of their neighbors at risk. 

That worked nicely for a while in the UK and almost everywhere in the world, with people accepting in good faith to be locked into their homes for the sake of the common good. But there was a problem: it soon became clear that the lockdown was doing great damage to the very people it was supposed to protect. Stuck in small spaces, often without a job, without money, and without perspectives, people's health was badly affected. Heart attacks, depression, substance abuse, suicides, and more: we can't yet estimate how many life-years were lost because of the lockdown, but wasn't the solution worsening the problem? Unfortunately, in narrative terms, moral considerations always take precedence over cost-benefit analyses, and so the question couldn't be asked in the public debate. But, surely, it was being asked privately.

Then, it started becoming clear that Ferguson's model had big problems. It was a hodgepodge of lines of code put together as needed, never comprehensively documented, never independently tested, never having undergone a sensitivity analysis. As far as I can say from my personal experience with modeling, it was a model good enough for academic research, but hardly a tool that could be used to guide the policy of a national government. The problem was that there was no way to test if the model was correct or not. What if the model had badly overestimated the effectiveness of the lockdown, as some elements seemed to indicate?

Now, let's assume that someone in the upper echelons understood that the case for the lockdown was not at all so clear cut as it had seemed to be at the beginning. Then, a huge problem appeared. The government couldn't just tell people, "oops... folks, we made a mistake. We beggared you for no reason." 

Think in narrative terms, as politicians do, and remember that the lockdown had been framed as morally and ethically as "good" while no lockdown framed as "evil." The politician who proposes to end the lockdown would be seen as evil himself/herself. There follows, as politicians know, that the way to change policies is to change the narrative. That has rules, just as science has rules. Typically, evil cannot be turned into good (Sauron can be defeated but not turned into Gandalf's friend). But it is possible to turn good into evil when a supposed good guy turns out to be actually evil (Saruman the White who turns into Sauron's ally). And that's the key: turn the good guy into the bad guy and then the narrative can be changed. 

At this point, the path is clear: take the person who proposed the lockdown, Neil Ferguson, and turn him into an evil, amoral, egoistic, and reckless character. That can't have been difficult: mounting a petty sex scandal surely poses no problems for a national government. Of course, we have no proof that this is exactly what happened, but the gist of the story is clear: Ferguson's head had to roll. And it had to roll as noisily as possible. Afterward, the whole edifice that the former good guy had built can be targeted at will with the heavy artillery of the media.

It is happening. Not only Ferguson is being shredded to pieces (actually, all the way down to atomic particles), but also his work is being massively and aggressively criticized. Note what Elon Musk said about him: “This guy has caused massive strife to the world with his absurdly fake ‘science." We'll have to see how things will evolve in the coming days but right now, if things keep moving in this direction, the lockdown is a dead hippo in the water. And so be it: it had to be.

From this story, we can also learn something about the climate debate. You see on the image at the beginning of this post how the enemies of climate science had no qualms in associating Neil Ferguson with Michael Mann, a climate scientist often targeted with all sorts of smears and lies. Fortunately, so far Mann has been able to avoid getting entangled in some stupid scandal, but scientists as a category came under attack for lack of coherency when they use planes for their international meetings where they recommend people to stop using fossil fuels. No government ever implemented serious model-based policy choices about climate, although many of them claimed to have done that. But if something serious were ever to be done to follow the recommendations of climate science, you might see a much nastier backlash against climate scientists. 

Will we ever able to blend science and politics together? For sure, it is a very difficult task. We need nothing less than a completely different political language, a way of debating that would search for common ground instead of focusing only on shooting down the bad guy of the story. But that will take time, to say the least. And, in the meantime, we keep navigating toward the future thinking that the reefs don't exist if they are not mentioned in the media.





A comment from Mr. Kunning-Druger, Ugo Bardi's personal troll.

Glad to see that you finally recognize at least some of your many mistakes, Mr. Bardi. And the mistakes made by this friend of yours, this despicable Mr. Ferguson -- despicable indeed, as you say. And you even have the gall to tell us that he created a model that is "good enough for academic research, but not reliable enough to be used as a policy tool." Why don't you say things the way they are: that model is crap. Yeah, stuff that comes out of a bull's rear end. And you gave yourself away when you said, "good enough for academic research." Shameful: you scientists spend public money to publish academic papers just thinking of your academic careers and then you take planes to go to academic meetings and enjoy nightlife and cocktails at the expense of the taxpayers! And then you think you can tell us what to do. You even think you can tell the government to lock everyone in jail as if we were criminals. But it is not the people who are criminals: it is you and your fellow scientists who are criminals. Now, this scandal about the coronavirus is going to really destroy you -- and I can split an infinitive here, just like the public will split your gang and have all of you truly skewered, not just in a metaphorical sense, ha! This is the end of the whole scam called "climate science" and you know that very well. Mankind can thank Mr. Ferguson for this: at least he made it clear what kind of people those "scientists" (so to say) are. Ugly, amoral, reckless, evil, power-hungry monsters -- not surprising that they ganged up together to create the scam called "global warming" just to fill their pockets with public money. Make no mistake: we'll remember this scandal. It is the beginning of the end of fake science and scientists.

Why Italians are not singing anymore: the problem of a weak state

Shows of brutality are used by politicians to look "tough on crime," but they are a mark of weakness, not of strength. Something similar has happened in Italy where a weak government imposed harsh confinement measures on citizens. They didn't arrive to force everyone to wear iron chains, but the idea was similar: politicians trying to look "tough on the virus. Image: convicted inmates from Brevard County Jail.

In some places in the US, jail inmates are forced to wear black-and-white striped costumes and chains around the ankles. In some cases, even iron balls are attached to the chains. Without denying that there exists a crime problem, you may reasonably argue that this is not the best way to reduce it. But these spectacular measures are chosen by politicians competing against each other by showing that they are "tough on crime."

Something similar seems to have happened in Italy, with local politicians competing against each other to impose on citizens harsher and harsher measures against the coronavirus epidemic. Also in this case, without denying the gravity of the epidemic, you may reasonably argue that most of these measures were not the best way to fight it.

The Italian lockdown was probably the harshest seen anywhere in Europe. It involved a series of unclear and often contradictory orders from the government, sometimes looking like they were meant to harass citizens rather than stopping the epidemics. Just as a few examples, you could be fined if your spouse rode in the family car in the front seat rather than in the back seat. You could take your dog for a walk, but not your child. You could buy cigarettes, but not books. You could buy newspapers, but not office supplies. You could walk in the street, alone, but not run. In addition, your neighbors could report you to the police if they thought you were doing something that was not allowed by the government, and in many cases they did.

So, why did the Italian government behave like a poor imitation of Stalin's Soviet government at its darkest moments? My impression is that it is because it is an extremely weak government -- a fragile coalition created in a hurry less than one year ago mainly with the purpose of avoiding early elections. No ideas, no plans, just a bunch of politicians engaged in a struggle for their political survival.


Dictatorship is the mark of a weak government: lacking real strength, dictators try to look strong by taking (indeed) dictatorial measures. Their only legitimacy is provided by fear and their survival depends on their capability of scaring their citizens. It is a point well explained by Chandran Nair in his book "The Sustainable State" (2018). An excellent book, well worth reading, it forcefully makes the point that no serious measure can be taken against threats such as pollution (or, recently, the coronavirus epidemic) if the state is not strong and enjoys a prestige sufficient to avoid that politicians start competing with each other instead of worrying about the needs of the citizens.

Nair has in mind China as an example of a strong state and, indeed, China managed the epidemic in an extremely effective way, although with some uncertainties at the beginning, But for an example closer to our world, Germany also did reasonably well with the epidemic. According to an article recently appeared on "The Atlantic", it was the result of the cautious management by the German chancellor Angela Merkel. No scare tactics, but honesty and trust.

Merkel has relied heavily, and very publicly, on the expertise of a handful of experts, including the now famous Christian Drosten, the head of virology at the Charité hospital in Berlin. From the perspective of the public, Pries said, the chancellor and the virologist “are very trustworthy.” People know “that what they get from both Drosten and Angela Merkel are real and very well-considered facts” and that the two also “share information about what they don’t know.” Because they are “honest with respect to their information,” he said, that information is seen as credible. This honesty, at a time of widespread disinformation, Pries told me, was playing a big role in persuading Germans to largely continue to follow the rules and maintain, even now, “a very calm situation in Germany.”

Below, you'll find an article that I wrote for Al Arabiya a few weeks ago, discussing how at the beginning Italians had taken the "stay home" order as both a challenge and a duty, to the point that they would sing from their windows and balconies. But that soon stopped: right now, the mood has soured, with many Italians fed up with the measures forced on them and with a government treating them as if they were unruly children. Right now, the epidemic is winding down, but the economic crisis is rapidly deepening. Money is running out and people are becoming desperate. The government doesn't seem to have any idea about how to manage the crisis and, at this point, anything can happen.

Coronavirus: Why aren't the Italians singing anymore?

By Ugo Bardi Friday 03 April 2020

At the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, a few weeks ago, Italians seemed to have found a moment of national unity when the country’s lockdown began March 9. Everyone understood that it was a difficult moment, but took it as a challenge to fight the virus together. Italian flags were hung from windows and people sang from their balconies and windows.

More than three weeks later, patience is wearing thin and the singing has stopped. Locked in their homes, people are scared, bored, and they don’t know what to do or what to expect. The media has done what they are experts at: terrorizing people by a barrage of numbers taken out of context, gratuitous sensationalism, and fake news. Politicians quickly discovered that scaring people pays, and that in difficult moments they could gain popularity by enacting tougher and tougher laws enforcing the lockdown.

Being locked at home with the police patrolling the streets is eerie. It looks like a post-apocalypse science fiction movie, something one would never have expected to see in real life.

In this situation, it seems that everyone has found convenient culprits in the European Union and Germany, who are accused of not doing enough to help Italy in this difficult moment. Several right-wing politicians are openly calling for Italy to leave the European Union and, perhaps in anticipation, the European Union flag has been taken down in some government buildings without anyone daring to enforce the law that makes it mandatory to hang it. The Germans are viewed today by Italians in the same way their ancestors in the Roman Empire viewed their neighbors: Northern barbarians to be feared and despised.

It is not just a question of being locked inside their homes. Italians are discovering that they have suddenly become poor. The Italian economy has taken a terrible beating from several sides. The income from international tourism – which generates 40 billion euros annually – is lost for this year, and nobody knows when (or if) tourists from abroad will return.

And that says nothing about the effect of the crisis on other industries: airlines, transportation, and entertainment among others. Optimists say that the Italian gross domestic product (GDP) will lose 10 percent this year, but some say it will see larger losses. But GDP is an abstract number, whereas workers in the tourism industry who have lost their jobs, very actively feel that loss. Many others are still theoretically employed, but they don’t know if their job will still exist after the emergency is over. Plenty of others are simply running out of money, and food riots in southern Italy have been reported – fortunately only minor episodes have occurred so far. What is perhaps the most anxiety inducing is that no one knows what might happen if the lockdown continues for much longer.

Yet, there is also good news for Italy: The most recent data show that the epidemic has peaked and is now winding down. In a few weeks, it may be over.

Not only is it a victory for the Italians who accepted the sacrifice of the lockdown, it is a historical occasion to learn from past mistakes and to do better going forward. Unfortunately, no one in power can seem to conceive anything but a return to the old ways: there is an absence of progressive policy makers developing a real transition to a green energy economy, for example.

Only a few people recognize the opportunities that the moment offers. We could go for a “green reboot” that could free the Italian economy from its traditional dependency on imported oil and gas. Further, with more activities becoming virtual, it could be time to reform the bloated and inefficient Italian state bureaucracy.

Italians are known to be resilient and enterprising, and there is still a chance to work for a better Italy. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll remember the time when we sang from balconies as the start of a new era.


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Ugo Bardi teaches at the University of Florence, Italy, and he is a full member of the Club of Rome. He is the author of “Before Collapse” (Springer 2019).

How effective is a hard lockdown against the COVID epidemics? The data say not so much

Data about the mortality of the coronavirus epidemic start being available. Above, a list of mortality rates for Western European countries (including the US) taken from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. The data are ordered by the projected number of deaths per million inhabitants. In addition, I built a "lockdown score," also based on the data reported by IHME (except for the US, where different states chose different options). It would be difficult to say that these data support the idea that a "hard" lockdown that includes a stay home order is more effective than a looser kind of lockdown. (for a live version of the table, write to me at ugo.bardi(whirlette)unifi.it)

Your friend has a headache. She takes a pill and, after a while, she feels much better. And she is sure that it was because of the pill. Maybe, but how does she know that the headache didn't go away by itself? Was the pill a homeopathic medicine? In this case, you could tell her that she ingested pure sugar, unlikely to cure anything. But, if you ever tried something like that, you know that it is nearly impossible to un-convince someone who believes to have been healed by the miraculous powers of homeopathy or the like. It is a typical problem of medical studies: how do you know that a treatment is effective? That's why there exist precise rules defining how you can test a new drug or treatment.

Now, let's go to the coronavirus epidemic: practically every region in the world has been affected and practically every government has implemented some kind of rules to stop the epidemic from diffusing, from voluntary social distancing (Sweden) to stay home orders enforced by the police. Almost everywhere, most people are convinced that the lockdown has been effective in reducing the spread of the epidemics. Maybe, but how can we say? Not having a "blank experiment" to compare with, it might be argued that all these new rules are the equivalent of homeopathic pills: a little sugar and nothing else.

Right now, the data are still uncertain, but they are accumulating and I think we can at least try some sort of preliminary analysis by comparing the results of countries where the lockdown rules have been implemented in different ways. An especially interesting way to do that is to look at the data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. These data are good for this purpose because:

1. The IHME provides a large dataset for several relatively homogeneous countries in Europe in addition to the US.

2. The data include projections for the total mortality at the end of the epidemic cycle and so we can compare countries where the epidemic started at different moments

3. The data also include a list of the rules implemented by each government, whether they include "stay home" orders which we may see as defining a "hard" lockdown, or just invites to citizens to maintain a certain distance from each other. (but note that a "hard" lockdown in Western countries is much softer than the versioni implemented in China and other Asian countries)

Here is an example of the IHME projections. In the case of Italy, you see how the epidemic follows its typical curve and it is going down after the acute phase is over.

Note that I focused on the records on mortality because they seem to be the most reliable ones, unlike those on infected people that depend on the number of tests. About Italy, I checked with independent data on the excess mortality from all causes from the Euromomo site. It seems that the mortality rates coincide, these data are reasonably good.

The results I found for several countries are shown in the table at the beginning of this post (not the complete data set, only Western Europe). You can peruse the table yourself (for a "live" version, write to me) and come to your own conclusion. In practice, the mortality rates range from a maximum of about 700/million to a minimum of 10-20. I cannot find a clear relationship between the mortality rate and the harshness of the rules imposed by local governments.

My impression is that the kind of "hard" lockdown imposed in countries such as Italy or Spain didn't help so much, perhaps not at all. For instance, Germany and Austria do well in the list without the need for a stay home order. But, of course, you might also focus on Sweden's relatively poor performance to argue that very loose rules are not a good idea. However, in this case, you might also note that Norway, a country similar to Sweden, is doing much better also with a relatively soft lockdown. Then you might consider other factors, for instance, population density. A colleague of mine (Claudio Della Volpe) examined the data for this factor and he found that there may be a weak dependence but, at present, it cannot be said for sure.

So, my conclusion is that the hard lockdown is unjustified and probably useless, but let me repeat: these are PRELIMINARY data and this is a TENTATIVE analysis, justified only on the urgency we have to manage the epidemic the best we can. Consider that the lockdown is causing a lot of suffering for a lot of people and risks leading us to complete collapse. We should try to do what we can to understand if it is effective. Let me also note that I am NOT DENYING that the COVID-19 virus is killing people, and I AM NOT SAYING that nothing should be done to stop the spreading the epidemics. (and I am not saying that the virus is an engineered bioweapon, or that it is an evil plot to enslave all of us, gosh!). I just placed on line the data I found for the benefit of the readers of Cassandra's Legacy who may interpret them the way they like. When we'll have better data, we'll be able to arrive at more solid conclusions.

As a final note, the story of the coronavirus epidemics shows how we humans tend to politicize/polarize everything. Not that the virus itself, poor critter, is left- or right-leaning, but by now the Right and the Left have taken sides. The right in the US is against a hard lockdown, while the left favors it. At this point, speaking against the lockdown turns you automatically into a Trumpist and a supporter of the NRA, if not of the Ku-Klux-Clan (and of Bolsonaro, too!).

As an example, yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to a study by Yitzhak Ben Israel, (*) of Tel Aviv University that seems to support the idea that most lockdown rules are not very effective against the virus (and note that I didn't even say I thought the paper was correct -- I can't read Hebrew!). But, as I should have expected  I was defamed and abused just for having linked that obvious piece of Israeli propaganda, surely a hoax thought to support the bad orange man and his ilk (surprisingly, my readers on Facebook seem to be familiar enough with Hebrew to be able to easily detect the mistakes in a scientific paper written in that language).

So, why is the stay-home ruling "Left" while no stay home is "Right"? Beats me. For those of you who can understand Italian, I leave you with a scene from a movie by Francesco Nuti, where he examines various kinds of cold meats concluding, among other things, that mortadella (bologna) is communist, while prosciutto cotto (cooked ham) is fascist.







(*) Dr. Ben Israel was so kind to send me a version of his paper in English. If you would like to have it, write to me