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Ethan Strauss's avatar

I'm making this post free, per requests from Subscribers here, on email and Twitter

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Joseph Conner Micallef's avatar

At this point I think we're firmly in the realm of sunk-cost fallacy. The drug war is apt: both were these initial pushes to stomp out a problem that never really got rid of the problem. The problem would stay festering and then explode again, with another wave of harsh crackdowns, but the low-level crackdown never faded. And I think we're at the point with COVID where we were after the crack epidemic - we know this isn't working, we know that our crackdown failed and ratcheting up the clamps will only have marginal effects, but we can't admit out loud that the time we already spent cracking down was all for naught.

The same parallel can be drawn between this and Afghanistan - stopping means admitting it was all for nothing, and when your job relies on public opinion that means sometimes it's preferable for you to keep up the fight rather than admit that the fight was lost and we'd have been better off just not fighting at all.

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