I think there’s a simpler explanation which is that governments are comprised of people, and people are — to borrow a phrase — predictably irrational. We consis

I think there’s a simpler explanation which is that governments are comprised of people, and people are — to borrow a phrase — predictably irrational. We consistently prioritize the short term over the long term. Take Climate Change. There’s no shortage of brilliant scientists who have warned us of the long term costs (in human toll and wealth) of inaction. Yet we wait. Unfortunately, scientists are not the ones flying the plane, so to speak. There are brilliant epidemiologists here in the United States. What are their recommendations behind closed doors? Classified. We don’t know. We do know the opinions of the ones who are free to speak their minds, and they have been warning us to be proactive. For years, before this crisis, actually. The rest of us are sitting in the back of the plane, uncomfortably contemplating whether the pilots have perhaps made a fatal error in their judgement. It happens. Now we wait. To quote Carl Sagan: “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness“