Status quo bias is when one prefers the current state of affairs simply because it is the current state of affairs. First described by the economists William Zechauser and Richard Zeckhauser, this particular cognitive bias has been documented in many scientific studies.
However, you’d hope that it wouldn’t affect decision-making over something as consequential as a national lockdown. Where the lockdown is concerned, you’d hope that rational judgement based on firm principles, or rigorous cost-benefit analysis, would prevail.
Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case, as the Tory peer Daniel Hannan argues in a piece for Conservative Home:
Would anyone, coming fresh to our current situation, propose a lockdown? The vulnerable have been shielded: around 95% of people over 50, along with healthcare and care home workers, have had what turns out to be a highly effective vaccine. The inoculation programme is now reaching healthy people in their early forties – people for whom, in most cases, the virus would manifest as a cold. As I write, the latest daily death count is six. Not six per million. Six.
Even if you believe a lockdown was necessary to “flatten the curve” (which, incidentally, it very likely wasn’t), the curve has now been thoroughly flattened. And with seasonality starting to kick-in, any remaining benefit of lockdowns is rapidly approaching zero. (Recall that every European country saw declining death numbers last May.)
Despite all this, some lockdown measures are still in place. Hannan continues:
The trouble is that lifting restrictions is an altogether tougher proposition than not imposing them in the first place. People tend to anchor to the status quo. Governments are reluctant to relinquish the powers they assumed on a supposedly contingent basis. Just as with post-war rationing, bureaucrats fear chaos if controls are lifted, and struggle to understand the (admittedly counter-intuitive) notion of spontaneous order. Freedoms, as always, need to be prised from the cold grip of the administrative state.
And as Hannan notes, the costs of the ongoing measures are far from trivial:
Well, for one thing, each of the next 19 days will cost us several hundred million pounds. Sums that would have horrified us a year ago have now become unremarkable; but they haven’t become any smaller. To say “just another couple of weeks” is much easier if you are a government official at home on full pay than if you are, say, a restaurateur or hotelier. Every day in lockdown is adding weeks to our recovery.
It’s time for the Government to acknowledge that the last four months have gone better than expected, and the remaining lockdown measures should be lifted immediately. Meanwhile, Hannan’s article is worth reading in full.
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I hate change and I hate illogicality (probably on the spectrum). That only makes me wish to get back more urgently, staying where we are now is disgusting to me, and that’s saying something, I was mostly miserable before 2019.
Yeah me too. I see revolt, even with armed methods, as logical and justified because of the complete abuse of power and complete ineffectiveness of the measures. If the UK had 1000 deaths per million or less, maybe it would have been kinda worth the year spent under house arrest. But it wasn’t, and the collateral damage only adds to the sheer toll that has been taken. I would never want anyone to have this kind of power over me ever again.
Thanks Dan, I’ve always liked what you have to say. You ask
‘why am I saying this (about lockdowns being disproportionate) now ?’
I don’t know Dan but, apart from the vaccine issue, we’ve known that for the past twelve months.
Well, not to split hairs (ooops – I suppose I am) thirteen months now and, very sadly, counting.
We’re still in lockdown because our leaders are a combination of incompetent and wicked, exact proportions of each debatable.
People tolerate it because of the unprecedented, unopposed global propganda effort, and because fear is a powerful motivator, and because of sunk cost fallacy.
Yes – there a lot of syndromes going into this. But, for sure, the fundamentals are not getting better.
We’re still in lockdown because of an Agenda.
“Are We Being Kept in Partial Lockdown by Status Quo Bias?”
No. We’re being kept in partial lockdown because there is now a huge global industry dependent on lockdown, masks, distancing, vaccines, testing and fear remaining in the longer term. An industry which has deep pockets and is financing the media to keep the fear going.
That too.
It’s a cross between political ideology and financial gain for a very few people.
Yup, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Economic melt down, Masks, tests, PPE and fear all advantages for China.
Not just China, though they are arguably benefitting the most as a country. Look at who the partners of the WEF are and you will see they benefit too, which includes a lot of companies and organisations based in the UK, USA, Canada and Germany, to name a few others.
Perhaps we’re still in lockdown because this is meant to be the new normal, and will “help with climate change” and the destruction of Western capitalism and a new socialist one world order so favoured by political leaders across the world.
We might be allowed a few summer months to enjoy ourselves and be grateful for it, before another winter of restrictions.
Boris said early last year, as lockdown was first imposed, that there’d be no return to normal, and there’ll be a new normal instead. Everyone should have taken notice of that.
Isn’t it interesting that the people who seem to shout the loudest about climate change are the biggest personal users of resources. Just take our own Boris – 6 or more children, then bill gates with 3 or more children and jets and yachts I think. Is it just for the poor to stop having children and cut back on their meagre homes and cars?
You forgot Al Gore, the biggest hypocrite of all, who has made billions from the scam, owns several massive properties and travels the world in private jets.
I certainly picked up on Boris’s warning pronouncement, along with him quoting phrases out of Klaus Schwab’s publications and wearing a WEF lapel badge at one of the coronavirus briefing sessions.
Klaus’s Agenda.
Long felt they are trying to transfer this to so called “climate change”.
Anybody who has become comfortable with the present status quo is insane.
And guilty of supporting and complicity in crimes against humanity.
That is the majority it seems.
Yes – the saddest exposure about humans that has come to light in my lifetime.
To be precise – it’s induced mass psychosis.Only relative ‘comfort’ – a retreat from fear.
It’s quite scary to think there are actually people out there who are not only evnjoying every minute of this insanity but would be quite happy for this madness to carry on indefinitely – I’m convinced that there are some who would actually welcome curfews and even more restrictions than before … .
Hannan :
“To say “just another couple of weeks” is much easier if you are a government official at home on full pay”
… or saying anything as a privileged establishment journo-politician on the Lords gravy train?
Cynic, you are as bad as me!
It’s not about a virus. It’s about a bunch of amoral war criminals controlling your life
A young man in my village who doesn’t bother to work and has hair down to his waist, last March in the very early days told me “there is no virus, this is about the economy”. I often think about that.
To answer the question at the top of the article: we are being kept in lockdown because certain influential members of SAGE want to continue with it and the government is happy to oblige. The BBC’s attempt to portray Johnson as a lockdown sceptic is truly laughable.
Leave Francis Rossi out of it please.
The Status Quo is probably better than the WHO