Heavy lifting: India’s lockdown tradeoffs

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Slave traders, Confederate heroes, colonizers, they're all hitting the ground in America and Britain. Activists want plenty of statues torn down, but there's a nuanced debate to be had about how to right historical wrongs and how to teach people about them. And the idea of a winning streak is a seductive one. Sure, gamblers and sporting types think that they get in the zone, but is it real? And does it matter if it is? If people just believe it, economists are again, or rather still weighing in. First up, though, In India, new coronavirus cases are spiking. Today, for the first time, authorities announced more than 10,000 new cases in 24 hours. The total number is now almost 300,000. Earlier this week, an official in Delhi said the city could have more than half a million cases by July. Even as more people fall ill, the country is opening up. Cities are beginning to bustle. Transport is running. Places of worship are open. It's clear that India's vast and haphazard lockdown, the world's largest, had punishingly high costs. But lifting it will surely take a toll in the form of new infections.

The numbers keep rising inexorably.

Max Rodenbeck is the Economist's South Asia bureau chief, based in Delhi.

There's a thought that if India does peak, it's still many weeks away, perhaps at the end of July. And right now, India has the third largest number of new cases every day. And considering the pace of things, it may be that within a few weeks, India is actually the number one country in the world.

But in spite of all of that, it seems that India is lifting many of its restrictions. I mean, what does that look like on the ground?

Well, literary fictionalism movement have disappeared in place like Delhi. There's still a supposed curfew in Delhi. Everyone's supposed to be home at 9pm and not out on the streets until 5am the circumstances are different in every Indian state, so slightly different. And there are also districts that remain under complete lockdown. I mean, for example, particular streets where there are lots of cases of COVID are still under severe lockdown. But internal flights have started up again. Railway services, not regular, but some railway services started up. Taxis and buses, yes, but Metro in Delhi, not. So it's a bit half.

Half.

A lot of offices are working at half speed. Restaurants are not open yet. Outdoor entertainment is not open yet. But places of religious worship are opened yet. And people are still, many people are still observing sort of social distancing to one degree or another. Ironically, people were taking things more seriously during the lockdown, when in fact the danger was much less.

And so the only reason the government would go about lifting the lockdowns is for economic motivations, I presume.

Y I mean, they really had to, in a sense, because the economy took a sharper blow than almost any other country of its scale in the world. You know, India has paid a much higher economic price than it has so far. A price in lives for Covid. I mean, we had nearly 140 million workers are thought to have lost their jobs during the lockdown. I mean, so a huge number of workers, 140 million people is a lot. So businesses closed down. There's a lot of businesses that were already having trouble. India has a high debt problem, problem with a dodgy bank. Lo, the economy was already not looking well before COVID So this is all added to that kind of unhappiness.

But even still, the lockdowns seem to be lifted perhaps earlier than they should. I mean, what good have the lockdowns done so far? Do you have a sense for how much it worked, at least giving it a go as long as they did.

Well, there's no question that it kind of slowed the spread of the disease. I mean, epidemiologists and various models suggest that the number of lives saved could be anything from 20,000 to 200,000. That's the highest. But the trouble is that the lockdown was not really done very well. I mean, it was actually quite strict in a lot of places. But the trouble was, for example, with migrant workers. This was the most obvious example of how things did not work as expected. Migrant workers were first told, you cannot go back to your villages, you must stay in cities. And so they were locked into cities and actually beaten back at the borders of some of Indian cities by the police, not very tenderly. And they got increasingly desperate because they were Running out of money. So many migrants began just simply walking back to their villages, sneaking through the barricades, and eventually the government crumpled and backed off and began trying to supply, under pressure from the public transport, to these workers. Unfortunately, by then many of these workers had been exposed to Covid because obviously the first places in India to get Covid were its big cities. So then there was a huge migration back to villages of these workers, often carrying Covid with them. And in some Indian states, I mean, one of India's poorest states is Bihar, which has about 10 million people. It's in northeastern India. And according to some of the surveys, something like two thirds of all the COVID cases in the state were among returning migrant workers.

And we spoke early on in the crisis about the degree to which the Indian healthcare system was prepared for what might be coming. How is it coping?

Well, this is another one of the disappointments of the lockdown. There had been sort of hope that there would be a sort of massive ramping up of the healthcare service to meet the expected number of COVID patients, and there was a great eff to do something. But I think the rate at which the disease is growing has still taken people by surprise. So the health services right now are under severe strain, particularly in the big cities. I think in Mumbai right now, nearly 100% of intensive care beds are occupied, so there's a desperate rush to kind of open up more spaces. And this is taking a toll. Not just, I mean, it's not just that the hospitals aren't prepared, but the health workers are really overwhelmed. Many of them have gotten sick, for example. I mean, in Delhi alone, in one hospital, more than 300 medical staff were infected. So that's been a big problem, but also just overwork. And we spoke to a nurse in a suburb of Mumbai. She doesn't actually even work in a Covid hospital. She works in another government hospital treating all the overflow from the COVID patients. And she was describing a work week of 12 hour shifts with no days off for weeks on end until she actually came down with COVID herself. In other cases, that one is seen in Mumbai, there was a video that sort of went viral showing three medical interns, you know, just out of medical school, who were left in sole charge of 35 patients that were very seriously ill on ventilators with COVID And how.

Does India's response, India's situation look, regionally speaking? Is this reflected in neighbouring countries?

Very much so. Actually, India is looking a little bit better than some of its neighbors. Pakistan Right next door has a sixth of India's population, but it has almost half the number of confirmed Covid cases. And it seems to be more rampant in Pakistan, with even less of a medical infrastructure to cope with the disease. Bangladesh, another country with an enormous population, is also reaching its peak sometime in the next few weeks. So India is not alone in this part of the world. I mean, in the last couple of weeks, it's Latin America that has been the big growth area for Covid. But in the next month or so, Brazil will have peaked and the countries that are peaking will be largely Asian. And India and its immediate region, South Asia, is going to be the big, big bulge, which is a disturbing prospect.

Max, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

To follow all of the Economist's coverage of the COVID 19 pandemic and how it's swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com coronavirus. In London, overnight, workers boarded up statues. The Cenotaph War Memorial and a monument to Winston Churchill were covered in scaffolding ahead of protests this weekend. Around the world, statues have become flashpoints of racial reckoning. One of the first to fall in Britain was Edward Colston in the port city of Bristol.

Edward Colston is a very well known figure in Bristol. His name is all over the place. The problem is that his history is really taught in a very, very selective way.

FiamettaroCCO is the Economist's culture correspondent.

It's taught to Bristol children that he was a philanthropist, that he benefited education, that he was incredibly generous. The fact is that his wealth grew out of trafficking 84,000 African slaves to America and the Caribbean.

Black slaves built Bristol.

We have to walk these streets and see that statue of Colston's every day. That's what it means. That statue is a kick in the face to all black people.

On Sunday, anti racist and protesters tore down Bristol's cold statue and dumped it in a harbor. Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that those hijacking peaceful protests, as he put it, will face the full force of the law.

I will not support or indulge those who break the law or attack the police or desecrate public monuments. We have a democracy in this country. If you want to change the urban landscape, you can stand for election or vote for someone who will.

But from King Leopold II in Belgium to Jefferson Davis in Virginia, from a Churchill monument in Prague to an enslaving explorer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, statues are losing their status. It seems that the desire to challenge history is becoming as widespread as the Desire to celebrate it.

Human beings are hardwired to put up statues, it seems, going all the way back to the Greeks, through the Romans, through the Christian church. We have put up statues for centuries. I suppose they honor the values, and they reflect the hierarchies of the times in which they were erected. They're incredibly symbolic. They are usually larger than life size. They're put on plinth, so they loom over us. Their presence is very, very imposing. But the problem is that they really lay bare selective memory. And I think one of the most extraordinary symbols of what's happened over the last few days has been when you see these statues tipping forward as they're pulled off their plinths. That is a symbol of a society at a tipping point.

But there are those that would argue that they should stay up, they should stay as a talking point, that removing them simply sort of tries to airbrush them out altogether and stifles that kind of conversation. What's your take on that?

I'm skeptical about the educational purpose of keeping statues up forever and ever. I mean, the statues that have been so much in contention in Britain over the last few days are mostly connected to Britain's history with slavery. They've been up for a very, very long time, and, you know, we haven't learned a great deal. Most people's engagement with the history of slavery in this country is to do with William Wilberforce and the abolition movement and how great we were at ending it. But many people don't realize the true extent to which wealth was generated in this country based on owning people. In the Caribbean, after London, the one city that had more slave owners in Britain than any other was Bristol. A lot of their heirs are still very, very, very rich. So when you see a statue of a slave trader being pulled down, that is a symbol of a city where inequity is baked into its economic history. Putting up statues, naming buildings is a certain kind of writing of history, but pulling them down is making history as well.

Is there any argument to leave the statues up to do the kind of contextualizing you described there for statues that are in place and to make the wider history known as balancing out the.

Story of one person as configured in a statue and giving it a wider context is always important. And that leads to a question of who makes these decisions and how they're made. Now, committees that have been debating what to do about statues and how to put context around them are often very, very divided. And that's exactly what happened with Colston. There had Always been a plaque naming the Colston statue. It talked about his philanthropy, it never talked about his role in the slavery. There was a discussion about putting up a second plaque, but there was a lot of pushback against it and it never happened at all. You know, you see the same kind of inertia in America. There are all sorts of laws protecting Civil War statues and have been for a very long time. Change is coming slowly there. And in Virginia, for example, new state law gives local governments the authority to remove monuments on their own.

What about the less clear cut cases though? Those people from history who at one time, or perhaps for their whole lives, held, held questionable views but did great works besides. How do you think about squaring that circle?

Well, this is where it gets really tough. History's not really simply heroes versus villains as if they were two opposing football teams. Frankly, it's foolish to throw overboard all those figures who have in any way offended modern morality, just as it would be to preserve every bronze villain just because he's ancient. As a rule, probably someone whose failings were subordinate in a way to their claim to greatness should stay. Whereas somebody whose main contribution to history was baleful should probably go. And the same rule works for America. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, but they were known chiefly for their contribution to the country. Confederate leaders. They're out, I'm afraid.

And so how does this nearer term story play out, do you think? There are criminal proceedings in some cases against the statue pullers and so on. How to sort out the immediate mess that this has made?

Well, the British Home Secretary has certainly said that she would like to see the people who pulled down the Colston statue prosecuted for criminal damage. I think that's pretty unlikely. It's not a very good use of state resources. In instances where crowds haven't taken matters into their own hands, state authorities have often taken the decision themselves. I mean, in Hungary they put their collection of communist era statues into a rather weird place called Memento Park. Mumbai put its statue of Edward VII into the zoo. Bristol has fished Colston out of the water and they will eventually probably put him into a museum. What would be interesting would be to see what they do with the plinth from which he was torn down. It's now covered in placards to the Black Lives Matter movement. Placards of complaint, placards of outrage. If they were able to do something with that plinth and the history that happened when that statue was pulled off, do you know, that would be far more educational than continuing to let Colston watch over Bristol.

Piammetta, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Have you ever felt like you were on a winning streak? Like you couldn't go wrong with making investments, playing cards, catching popcorn in your mouth? The idea has captured the attention not just of gamblers and sports enthusiasts, economists in basketball, hot hand is the theory that once a player scores, they're more likely to score again. Lots of players believe it to be true. Economists haven't been so sure.

Another milestone for the Greek LeBron James.

This idea of the hot hand phenomenon has been around for decades, really, and academics have taken a keen interest.

Beau Franklin is the Economist's assistant news editor.

There was a famous study in the 1980s done by psychologists at Cornell and Stanford University, and they looked at the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team to see whether once a player does score, if he's more likely to score again and get into a streak of success. And they found that it didn't exist. But Years later, in 2015, researchers looked back at the original study and found that there were some flaws in the research. The ways that the researchers had calculated the probability that the players would make their next shots seemed to be flawed. So they ran the numbers again, and they did find a hot hand effect existed for the Philadelphia 76ers. So this kind of rekindled the debate, and researchers have been looking at it ever since, really. So recently, some economists at Ball State University in Indiana, very aptly named, had a look at a huge data set. They looked at over 500,000 free throws and over 2 million field goals that were attempted in NBA basketball matches between 2004 and 2016 to find out whether they found evidence of a hot hand effect there.

And did they?

They did, ever so slightly. But it's probably not strong enough for either players or, for that matter, fans sitting in the stands to detect. So a hot hand effect was most noticeable from the foul line in free throw attempts. That's where there's a more controlled environment. Players are standing in the same place every time, and they don't have defenders or kind of movement to distract them so much. And in that scenario, a basketball player who successfully makes a free throw and scores is about 2 percentage points more likely to do so the next time he attempts. So it seems like he does kind of build up momentum and get into a streak. And this effect got stronger with successive baskets, they found. So the more times you tried it, the more successful you seem to get. Although after the fourth consecutive shot, it started to weaken A bit.

And did they get into why this may be? Is it just simply confidence?

Well, this is where it gets a bit speculative, but it's probably an effect of muscle memory. So if you're standing in the same position, doing the same movement over and over again, you're more likely to be able to refine how you do it. And if you succeed one time, you can try and replicate that. And an interesting thing is that in open play, where players are moving around more, they're shooting from different locations, and they have defenders who are trying to block them that they have to deal with, the effect of a hot hand disappeared completely. So when a player makes three field goals in a row, which is where they're moving around more in open play, his chance of scoring on the next attempt actually fell by half a percentage point. So that wiped out the effect completely.

But what about the sort of psychological effect? People just have that gut feeling that it's there. Surely that alone helps.

Yes, and that's possibly the most interesting part, because it applies outside of sports as well. The idea that even though the evidence might show that success doesn't necessarily lead to more success, inevitably people will still act as if it does. And you find this popping up in other fields, like gambling with people's decisions on what they risk and also investing as well. If a stock does well, then people see it as likely to do even better in the future and kind of pile into it. In basketball matches, players consistently behaved as if success was going to lead to more scoring. So the players who were trying to make the shots once they'd scored once, they were more likely to take their team's next shot. They do so from a further distance. They do so more quickly. And then defending teams kind of reacted in a similar way. So once a player from the opposite team has scored, defending teams would be much more likely to try and halt their momentum to stop them from scoring again.

So it stands to reason, then, whatever the numbers say, people are going to continue to believe it exists.

It seems like that's the case. Yeah. Obviously, the idea of the hot hand is a popular one, and it kind of feels right. And you see some of the most highly trained and honed athletes still subscribe to this belief. A good example is LeBron James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, and he's kind of regarded as one of the greats. And in a game earlier this year, he scored five times in three minutes, which is an incredible streak. And after the game, he was asked whether, despite all the evidence to the contrary, saying that a hot hand effect doesn't exist. Did he believe in the idea? And clearly he does. His response to the academics and the number of crunches who doubted that a hot hand exists. He said they've never, ever been in the zone in their lives.

Bo, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can start a discounted subscription to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer See you back here on Monday.

Sam.