Much of the lockdown effect was not imposed by top-down fiat
That&#x27;s a very interesting graph, but I think it&#x27;s not a complete story. Here&#x27;s another graph: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.endcoronavirus.org&#x2F;countries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.endcoronavirus.org&#x2F;countries</a><p>In particular, compare Sweden and the US with other countries (Norway, perhaps, or South Korea).<p>Given the lack of correlation between government lockdown policy and public transit ridership, there&#x27;s a couple of conclusions you could draw. One, as the author does, is that government lockdown policy doesn&#x27;t effect behavior. Another, based on the second graph, is that <i>none of the four cities the author shows</i> had a meaningful government-mandated lockdown - that yes, as the author says, people didn&#x27;t change behavior on their own, but that we can&#x27;t conclude that government has no leverage here because none of those cities tried very hard. (As an NYC resident I can tell you that the government is sitting quite firmly in the unfortunate valley between leaving people alone and actually having an effect: there&#x27;s a lot of people out of work and enough stories of nonsensical policing like throwing people in a crowded jail for not social distancing, but there are a lot of people, including our mayor himself, who are out and about in public that it isn&#x27;t obviously helping with R₀.) Another possible one is that public transit ridership is a limited subset of behavior and changes for its own reasons (it&#x27;s hard to maintain social distance and avoid touching metallic surfaces on a subway train) that don&#x27;t necessarily track whether people are staying home or whether they&#x27;re going around by means <i>other</i> than public transit.<p>While I do agree with the author that the model of the government having a magic lever is simplistic, I also don&#x27;t think it follows that the government has <i>no</i> leverage. There are a number of policies well within the powers of government, from unemployment eligibility to literally giving out food, that I&#x27;d think have a much more effective influence on whether people stay home than whether they&#x27;re told to stay home. (I suspect the author will agree with me that it&#x27;s better to use government levers other than &quot;we&#x27;ll send armed men after you if you don&#x27;t,&quot; if you have any.) The lockdown protests from people who want to return to work (to be distinguished from the protests from people <i>who want others to return to working for them</i>) are from people who need to work to survive and don&#x27;t have remote work options - there are other things the government could do to meet the underlying demands besides saying, okay, you can go to work. In general, it&#x27;s not that they want to leave their house, it&#x27;s that they have to.<p>And while I do agree with the author that it&#x27;s the people and not the government who make or break the lockdown (see also Hong Kong, where the citizenry realized that their government wasn&#x27;t taking the problem seriously, for a particularly good example), I don&#x27;t really think that ends the debate at all. I think the author is pretty wrong about whether it&#x27;s safe to send kids back to school, for instance!