EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HE HAS FORESEEN:  The Politics of Fear. Nobody understands politicians’ power grab during this pandemic better than Robert Higgs, who should have already won the Nobel in economics for his work. In Crisis and Leviathan, he famously demonstrated the “ratchet effect” of government growth, which mostly occurs in spurts during wars, financial panics and other crises, real or imagined. Higgs also identified the underlying psychological cause: the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly good ones, a cognitive bias that politicians and journalists exploit to foment fear and promote bigger government.

Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’ work in our book on the negativity effect, The Power of Bad, to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis — the never-ending series of hyped crises that lead to cures worse than the disease. The pandemic is just the latest and scariest example, in Higgs’ view. “I have an overwhelming feeling,” he told me, “that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse.”