- Brian Klaas at The Atlantic on Elon Musk’s flawed view of “waste,” i.e. any kind of preventative measures to spend money now to prevent spending much more money later;
- And simpleton measures about measles from RFK Jr.
- Paul Krugman on how the two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
I am fairly certain that none of the DOGE-driven cuts in government employment are the result of any kind of considered analysis. Just fire half of them, seems to be the reasoning, and the half we’ll choose will be the newest hires. That’s the depth of their analysis. This is combined with what I’ve long observed to be the relative simple-mindedness of conservatives. The MAGA fans cheering DOGE on are thinking, how could some Washington agency need 25,000 employees? If I can’t imagine what 25,000 people could possibly be doing, then they must be bloat. Get rid of ’em! How they decide that 10% of the staff should be cut, or 25%, or 50%, seems to be arbitrary. They have no idea.
Side issue: sure, there’s always *some* inefficiency in every organization. But there’s a point at which working to root out that inefficiency costs more than the inefficiency itself. Zealots seem not to realize this.
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This piece is about how the zealots think preventative measures are “waste.” They prefer immediate profits, and the costs of disasters that could have been prevented will be borne by someone else.
The Atlantic, Brian Klaas, 12 Mar 2025: DOGE Is Courting Catastrophic Risk, subtitled “Musk has turned a dangerously flawed view of ‘waste’ into a philosophy of government.”
The writer recalls the 2004 tsunami that killed 228,000 people.
After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.
DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”
Here again are themes of short-term thinking and marshmallow longtermism. And the complexity of the world that conservatives discount, or simply don’t understand.
The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.
Examples. Trump cancelled a coronavirus tracking system, months before COVID-19 broke out. A ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal upended global economy.
Here’s the point about short-term thinking:
DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.
And about insular thinking (i.e. “America First!”):
The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.”
Klaas concludes:
Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.
As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.
Because a government has responsibilities; that’s why governments are not businesses out to make a profit.
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Back to the point about simpletons.
Boing Boing, Carla Sinclair, 12 Mar 2025: RFK Jr.’s scary fiction: Measles vaccine “causes blindness…and death”
OK it’s not so much about being simple-minded, as being subject to base intuitions from primitive human nature, and the intellectual inability to overcome them.
What do you get when you put an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in charge of the U.S. Health Department? A dangerous crackpot who scares the public into thinking that the measles vaccination causes blindness.
“It does cause deaths every year,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Sean Hannity, explaining why he would not push the vaccine. “It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes — encephalitis and blindness, etc.”
As long established, you can’t change people’s biases by presenting them with facts.
What Kennedy failed to mention, however, is that globally, measles — not the vaccine — causes up to one million deaths a year, and between “15,000 to 60,000 cases of blindness per year,” according to the National Health Institute. And most victims never regain their sight. Meanwhile, there is no credible evidence (QAnon doesn’t count) that the vaccine has caused blindness, except for a few isolated incidents in which the patients fully recovered.
Ultimately this comes down to deep intuitions about fears of contamination, about injecting anything in the body, like vaccines. No amount of statistics will overcome this visceral fear.
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Today’s pick from the commentariat I follow.
Paul Krugman, 12 Mar 2025: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose, subtitled “Especially when you’re running a country”
The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
…
I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.
News reports still tend to sanewash what our leaders have been saying, and even selected quotations often make them sound more rational than they are. Fortunately, both are addicted to posting on social media, and you really have to read some of their posts to get a full sense of the madness.
And then he reproduces a screen from realDonaldTrump.
Leave aside the nonsensical claims that Canada is a high-tariff nation subsidized by the United States. When Trump first began talking about turning Canada into the 51st state, many people treated it as a joke. But Trump doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. He just keeps doubling down, even as the people of Canada grow ever more outraged. No sane leader would imagine that it’s a good idea to threaten a heretofore friendly but proudly patriotic neighbor and ally with annexation. But a sane leader is exactly what we don’t have.
And then how Elon Musk has doubled down.
How did the highest levels of U.S. government become infected by madness? Well, this is what you get when you give flawed people — people prone to grandiosity, vindictiveness and paranoia — so much power that nobody dares tell them when they’re going too far. Cowed Republicans and timid Democrats have effectively given Trump and Musk the freedom to become the worst versions of themselves.
And the whole world will pay the price.
Running late as usual.
