'There are any number of available models designed by actual experts. The only reason to jerry-rig a Kevin Hassett model is to provide a pretext to ignore them.'
President Donald Trump listens to Kevin Hassett, then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers , last year in the Oval Office. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images President Trump’s habit of promising unrealistically low casualty counts is one of the more inexplicable unforced errors in the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “One is too many,” he said on April 20, “But we’re going toward 50 or 60,000 people.
A chief culprit in the blunder turns out to be Kevin Hassett, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Despite having no expertise in epidemiology, Hassett designed his own model and “White House aides interpreted the analysis as predicting that the daily death count would peak in mid-April before dropping off substantially, and that there would be far fewer fatalities than initially foreseen,” reports the Washington Post.
Hassett’s role in the debacle is one of its less surprising developments. Throughout the course of the coronavirus saga, the supply-siders have anchored the administration’s anti-public health wing. Supply-siders are a conservative sect fanatically devoted to the reduction of top-level tax rates. They dismiss standard economic thought, circulating affirmations of their creed in their own lavishly-funded ecosystem of think-tanks, op-eds, and books.
The most incriminating aspect of his involvement is not that Hassett’s model was wrong, but that he decided to make one in the first place. There are any number of available models designed by actual experts. The only reason to jerry-rig a Kevin Hassett model is to provide a pretext to ignore them.
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