Is Jay Bhattacharya a libertarian?  Does it matter?

Jay Bhattacharya was an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should let covid spread freely among healthy people to reach herd immunity as quickly as possible.  The elderly and those whose health made them vulnerable to covid should be given “focused protection”.  Bhattacharya is now Trump’s nominee for director of NIH.

Dorman and Gelman on libertarians in government

In a comment on a recent blog post by Andrew Gelman, Peter Dorman says the following about Bhattacharya:

What makes him scary in this position is not his particular views on Covid or even his apparently limited statistical understanding, but what might be called his Lysenko tendencies. What made Lysenko a disaster was not his mistaken understanding of evolution (esp. since our understanding has continued to evolve!), but his identification of particular research methods and outcomes with political commitments. That’s how research gets suborned. It appears that Bhattacharya and his colleagues are libertarians and therefore offended by public health requirements. OK. But that bias should be kept separate from research, and if someone can’t do that they shouldn’t be in a leadership position over more conscientious researchers.

Gelman responded in part as follows:

I don’t mind if Bhattacharya’s libertarian political views (if he indeed has such views; I haven’t looked into this at all) affect his take on public health policy. I’m sure there’ve been many public health policymakers with strong social-democratic political views, and that will affect their take too.

Why it makes sense to worry about Bhattacharya’s libertarianism

There is no question that Bhattacharya is a libertarian (or perhaps more accurately a small-government classical liberal of the Hayekian sort, which is how I would label the views he espouses here).  He has also closely associated himself with libertarian think tanks.

Does this matter?  Gelman’s position seems to be that values will inevitably influence policymakers one way or another; indeed, policymakers will often be selected in part for their values.  This is unavoidable.  And it is not crazy to think that a thoughtful, libertarian-ish NIH director could implement some worthwhile reforms (aimed at reducing the cost and delays involved in drug development, or encouraging more risky lines of scientific research, for example).  On the other hand, voters and members of Congress still get to weigh in on whether the values of a nominee are in line with theirs, or if someone’s ideology poses a threat to an agency or its mission. 

As Dorman suggests, being a libertarian could influence the way Bhattacharya evaluates evidence and how he sets research priorities.  This is a particular concern with libertarians.  Libertarians tend to see morality in deontological terms and to reject tradeoffs.  Often they insist on specific policies regardless of the consequences.  This kind of rigid moral thinking is more likely to lead to motivated reasoning than utilitarian or pluralistic moral views that acknowledge complexity, tradeoffs, and competing values.  (The mainstream economists whose equivocation caused Harry Truman to ask for a one-handed economist were presumably not reasoning to ideologically pre-ordained conclusions.)  Libertarians also tend to see their disagreements with welfare state liberals and social democrats as a Manichean battle pitting defenders of liberty (the libertarians) against the dark forces of collectivism. 

If you are this kind of libertarian – if you strongly believe in limited government, and that progressives are (perhaps unintentionally) putting us on the Road to Serfdom, it is all too easy to put too much weight on evidence and reasoning that favors your preferred libertarian conclusion, and to dismiss or down weight arguments for non-libertarian conclusions.  Indeed, someone who is strongly committed to unpopular libertarian views would have an incentive to actively mislead voters, especially voters prone to naively support “collectivism”.

Bhattacharya has a history of dissembling and sloppy reasoning that suggests motivated reasoning or worse

During the covid epidemic, I believe that Bhattacharya often engaged highly motivated libertarian reasoning that led him to badly misinterpret evidence and to make arguments that were implausible or even incoherent.  Although it is always difficult to discern motives, a reasonable person could suspect that Bhattacharya was actively dishonest in the standard sense of saying things that he knew to be false with the conscious intent to deceive. 

I wrote up some of my criticisms of Bhattacharya and his colleagues for Science Based Medicine (here and here), and Angry Bear (see the many links at the end of the second SBM piece).  Here I will just highlight four points.  First, some of Bhattacharya’s arguments are simply incoherent.  For example, he argued that New Zealand’s zero covid policy was a disaster, because excess mortality in New Zealand was positive (more people died than would normally have been expected).  Bhattacharya blithely assumes that this excess mortality was an unanticipated side-effect of the zero-covid policy (people not getting timely medical care, etc.).  It turns out that Bhattacharya carelessly misread the data, and that excess mortality in New Zealand was negative.  But even if excess mortality in New Zealand had been positive, that would not show that the zero covid policy costs lives, because 1) the zero covid policy avoided many thousands of covid deaths, and 2) some of the excess deaths that did occur were covid deaths, not non-covid deaths that resulted from the zero covid policy.  Once we correct for these errors, using the data source Bhattacharya used, it seems clear that the zero covid policy saved thousands of lives, and it is far from clear that it caused a significant number of non-covid deaths. 

It is hard for me to see how a well-trained economist (Bhattacharya is an economist) could make such basic logical errors in thinking about the effects of zero covid policy on mortality.  But it is much easier for a libertarian to persuade non-libertarians that zero covid was a mistake if the libertarian can find some way to claim that the policy killed people.  Whether through motivated reasoning or deliberate fraud, Bhattacharya found his way to the conclusion he wanted to reach.

Second, we all say things that, in retrospect, we think were not well calibrated, or needed qualification, or misinterpreted a complicated argument.  But Bhattacharya’s pieces include citations to materials that do not support or flatly contradict his argument.  We should not underestimate the power of motivated reasoning, but it is not easy to see how an honest person in the grip of motivated reasoning can make this mistake multiple times.  How many times have you cited a paper or blog post for a proposition it simply did not contain, or even plainly contradicted?

Third, I think it was reasonable to ask if social distancing measures and masking were justified in October 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration was released.  But Bhattacharya and his co-authors greatly overstated the case against social distancing.  For example, they ignored the fact that vaccines were in clinical trials and might well be available for mass distribution in a matter of weeks.  They ignored the fact that treatment of covid was improving.  For both reasons, it was plausible to believe that delaying covid infections through social distancing and masking would save many lives, not just briefly until the next covid wave, but for many years until people died of other causes.  It was still reasonable to ask if social distancing was effective and worth the cost, but no reasonable person could claim that social distancing was clearly a mistake – unless that person was a libertarian ideologue who believed that government action is always wrong, or that free choice always trumps other values, including saving lives.

Finally, Bhattacharya rebuffed efforts to find common ground with his critics.  For example, he participated in a debate with Marc Lipsitch in November 2020.  Lipsitch coauthored an influential paper suggesting that non-pharmaceutical interventions may have been effective at delaying or reducing deaths during the 1918 flu epidemic.  Nonetheless, during the debate Lipsitch was not at all rigidly pro-lockdown; in fact, he argued repeatedly that it was important to get schools open. 

Bhattacharya could have taken him up on this suggestion.  He could have said “Marc, I believe that all lockdowns should end, but opening schools is critical and an area of common ground.  Let’s work together on re-opening schools.”  But he didn’t say anything like this; instead, he just bobs and weaves and refuses to engage.  You can read the transcript here. 

This is not how you would behave if you believed that opening schools is important, and that the most effective way to open them is to build a broad, bi-partisan coalition.  This is the kind of behavior you would expect from either a libertarian extremist who is unwilling to compromise, or from a self-promoter interested in maximizing controversy.