Link to thread: https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/1248715511145418752
"6. When someone tells you that 'we could never test that many people,' ask 'ok, so your plan is to stand by and do nothing as asymptomatic spreaders kill their colleagues?'"
"11. When you strip away all the noise and nonsense, note that once we cover essential workers, its easy test everyone in the US once every two weeks. Just do it."
In 6, he's saying "Ignore the difficult questions and morally shame people who question our plan."How cowardly and anti-intellectual is that?
I'm 11, just do it is a marketing slogan, not a plan.
This is shockingly bad for a scholar, a Nobel Prize winner, no less, which makes it Krugman levels of bad.
Maybe his more fully developed paper actually does better, but it looks to me like he's making the classic policymakers' mistake of focusing on the desired outcome, assuming lots of money is sufficient to cover the technical difficulties of getting there, and completely ignoring the pesky little problem of how you get all those damned recalcitrant individuals so actually agree to do what you want them to do. "Government says so" is not how you do it. If it was people wouldn't speed and prohibition would have been a smashing success.
I'm my experience there's less than one policymaker in a thousand who bothers to think about actual humans.