book review: Scared To Death (Omicron / Whitty edition)

At the risk of saying something very general, the late Christopher Booker used to love generalising the dynamics of phenomena into general forms with identified phases.

For archetypal stories, depending on which, this may include a dream stage, and a frustration stage, and so on, for example.  Groupthink instances (in a book finished by collaborator Richard North, also coauthor of the book reviewed here) also shared a structure, having similar phases to each other.  

And scares, too, have their structure, with their phases.

Scared To Death pulls together a bag of seemingly-unrelated episodes, and presents each one with the following commonalities: the authors, between them, are knowledgeable about it, and the episode had the dynamic of a scare, in the particular sense defined by the authors in the book.

I never thought I would be interested to read about the food poisoning scandals of eighties Britain, but my attention was held by this and many other topics.

It is over a decade since I read the book.  So I am going to butcher this.  But, from memory, the scares they describe have a form something like the following.  In the beginning, is some kind of problem.  And someone, who can see the problem, perhaps who works next to the problem, tries to draw attention to it, for the right reasons, to get it fixed.  But others, the generically-evil gloop of civil servants or corporate managers, want to keep it hush.  Some squeaks may appear in the media, and still they try to keep it hush.  Until they can't, and the problems suddenly surface, along with some facts about attempts to cover it up.  But media sensationalism, and the context of disinformation due to the attempted coverups, can lead to a low standard of information about what the root causes of the problems actually are.  Some kind of panic or hysteria may follow.  Eventually, the actual problems, often somewhat different from what the media coverage would suggest, may be addressed by technicians in the relevant fields, or have naturally subsided.  But although it may sound like this is the end of the scare, it enters here its most costly phase.  The slow grinding of the legal and regulatory systems will by now have generated its own responses, often ill-fitting to the original problems, at best slow to adapt in turn to the changing circumstances, onerous, and large in scale.  This regulatory hangover continues to take its toll, costing everyone dealing with the field, who must follow the rules, well into the future, or indefinitely.

I'm sure I embellished the above with my own interpretation, and left out some important parts of the general form.  But I am also sure about my recollection of the final phase.  It is one of the key lessons from the book, and something of a surprise.  Coverups and media sensationalism, while interesting, seemed like an expected part of the scare dynamic.  The regulatory hangover, I had not considered.  And the authors say it is the most expensive phase.  Another interesting take-away was: however distorted and off-target things get, the scare is nearly always, in its early stages, about a genuine and serious problem.

I've been wondering for some time whether the Covid pandemic will become a scare in this sense.  Having experienced the "papers please" crap taking over everywhere, it kind of already had.

But the rise of Omicron, a strain almost certainly fitting the pattern of (much) more infectious and (much) less pathogenic, looks like it is going to bring out the final, and possibly most costly, phase, and the one that will allow the pandemic as a whole to be classified as a scare, in the fullest sense as treated by this book.

In the UK, Clown Whitty, who failed so miserably to recommend any useful action in the early stages of the pandemic, is cranking up the fear on Omicron to 11.

And just as I was having these thoughts, and wondering if I should bring forward my review of Scared To Death, without re-reading it first, the book's coauthor, Richard North, published his own assessment, along these lines, in his pandemic-themed Turbulent Times article from yesterday Politics: the scare dynamic [0]

[0] https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/corona/politics-the-scare-dynamic/ 2021-12-17

No doubt Dr North has been having thoughts along these lines for some time, but the timing of his article [0] confirmed my idea to expedite publishing a review of his book Scared to Death.

It's also a good opportunity to use the clown pics I had someone make of Whitty during the first wave.

My main criticism of Scared To Death is its treatment of climate change.  Not for its critical look at the "SCIENCE!", but for its rather-too-uncritical pushing of its own climate-change hypothesis, which, while an interesting hypothesis, felt out of place in a book of otherwise-certain backwards-looking forensics.  The climate change scare is also unique within the book for its systemic global scope, an attribute which shifts evidential onus onto those messing with the natural system (thanks Taleb for making me aware of that one), and from memory, this aspect of the approach to risk is not treated in the chapter.  Despite this, the descriptive part of this chapter does a good job of showing up the misinformation and science!science!science! fraud characterising most media coverage and consensus climate "science".

Overall I recommend the book.  Not just for the interesting historical accounts from insiders.  But also as a tool for understanding the world, and spotting and understanding scares while they are still in progress.