Expert Failure and Pandemics: On Adapting to Life With Pandemics

Public health and expert failure

“…But examples often are contested or difficult to document unambiguously. It seems likely, for example, that the epidemiological models on which SAGE and others relied made an inappropriate "homogeneity" assumption that, as Ioannidis et al (2020) explain, "all people hav[e] equal chances of mixing with each other and infecting each other" (see also Murphy et al, 2021;Ridley & Davis, 2020). Models adopting the homogeneity assumption tend to overestimate the proportion of the population that must be infected or vaccinated to reach herd immunity (Britton et al, 2020;Gomes et al, 2020).…”

“…Separating out "economic" analysis from "scientific" analysis creates both disciplinary narrowness and the closely related phenomenon of disciplinary siloing, "whereby one becomes so engrossed in one's silo that one fails to consider, or may even be unaware of, other salient issues" (Murphy et al, 2021). It creates disciplinary narrowness by limiting inappropriately the numbers and types of scholarly disciplines brought to bear on the emergency.…”

Cascading expert failure

“…In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the influence of public health expertise show up in fields far removed from public health, but public health officials cared little for the insights of experts in those fields. I explore the effects of these choices by experts by combining the cascading failures literature (Banerjee, 1992;Baqaee, 2018;Bikhchandani et al, 1992;Wu, 2015) with recent work on the production of expert opinion Kamenica, 2017a, 2017b;Koppl, 2018Koppl, , 2021Koppl and Murphy, 2022;Murphy et al, 2021) to show that seemingly small expert failures can have cascading effects on the decisions of unrelated actors, leading to large adverse effects.…”

“…An expert may operate as an advisor to the government or even as an employee of a government agency, but the role of the individual is different. There is a kinship between the fields (Murphy et al, 2021), but expert failure is distinct.…”

“…Adam Smith was warning of the dangers of overreaching expertise in his classroom lectures (Smith, 1982) and published work (Smith, [1776(Smith, [ ]1981. The economic literature on failure focuses on incentive and institutional structures that can cause expert failure (Koppl, 2021;Murphy et al, 2021) and how receptive experts are to disconfirming information (Andreoni and Mylovanov, 2012;Kang and Kim, 2021). Knowledge issues also arise regarding how well the expert can advise the nonexpert (Hayek, 1945;Lavoie, 2016).…”