The goal that they advocate is “This number will need to increase over time (ideally by late July) to 20 million a day to full remobilize the economy” I don’t see how you get weekly/daily testing of 328 million American’s with 20 million tests per day. They explicitely advocate that over time we should target a testing capacity that’s lower then weekly/daily.
They advocate for testing of workers, and my quote was “for large parts of the population”, so explicitly not everybody. 140 million tests per week is enough to cover the 125 million full time employed Americans, which would be enough for weekly testing. However, it was an incorrect reading on my part to assume that these tests should be distributed randomly to everybody in the workforce, the approach in the roadmap seems to rely on aggressive contact tracing + tests.
Even if they would have spoken in favor of daily testing, saying “we want daily testing” isn’t enough to get daily testing. It would have been needed to say “We should be okay with cheap low accuracy tests and allow them to be brought to market”. That wasn’t articulated in the roadmap.
Why are you saying this? Appendix A, B,C, and D deal explicitly and at length with how to achieve such testing capacity. You may disagree with their approach, but it is laid out. For example:
INNOVATING FOR SCALE (ACHIEVING A MORE EFFICIENT 2 MILLION AND GETTING TO 100 MILLION) A potentially more powerful approach may be to develop simpler protocols. We are indeed seeing rapid innovation to accomplish this—for example, replacing nasal swabs with spit kits. Rapid innovation would favor lab structures with generic robots and plates that can be easily adapted. Innovative lab designs can then be cloned and replicated.
Furthermore:
To maximize existing testing capacity and throughput for asymptomatic surveillance, each household or community should be offered the option of daily sample pooling to facilitate early detection of the virus.
With regards to the top-down aspect, you say:
It’s decentral decision making where people on the ground and a lot of different perspectives are thus taken into account on the one hand and top-down bureaucracy on the other. The roadmap chooses the side of top-down bureaucracy.
This is again at the very least an incomplete and uncharitable summary. Appendix D deals with “innovative organizational strategies at the local level”:
response to the pandemic similarly needs a centralized authority for information gathering/dissemination, oversight of national production, and surge capacity, but it also needs a distributed capacity for execution that can respond quickly and flexibly to local circumstance.
It further lays out the benefits of a Fusion cell model that appears to integrate Top-Down with local decision making.
Again, it seems to me that your goal is to interpret this roadmap in an uncharitable way. Given that Glen Weyl has had reasonable criticisms of the rationalist community in the past, we should instead be maximally charitable.
Some points that I have not seen mentioned before:
a)
Yes, this is the natural course of events, just like it is natural that people will steal from me if I leave the door to my house open at all times. This however does not mean that the thieves are not morally to blame. (I understand this was not your actual point, but it is a common point in libertarian discussions). Both the manufacturer and the retailers consider the scalpers’ intention and tactics to be unwelcome. (Per the linked article, the scalpers have to write human impersonating bots to fool the retailers’ websites; they are not using public facing APIs). In that sense, scalpers are not playing by the rules and it is reasonable for people to be angry at scalpers, even though it may not agree with an utilitarian outlook on ethics.
b) Others have argued that through scalping people’s time vs people’s money is traded. That is correct, but it seems to me that you are also trading luck for money. Obviously, getting a PS5 in a store drop is governed by chance as well as time. I am not entirely sure how that changes the net welfare calculus:
On the one hand, through scalping the good goes to the consumer who is willing to spend the most in one resource (money), which is strongly correlated to how much they desire the PS5 (which is good for net welfare). Luck is not correlated to how much a consumer wants the good.
On the other hand, if you award goods by lotteries, people do not have to waste resources that do not actually incentivize the production of PS5s.
c) In the particular case of a PS5, it is preferable that the good goes to people with more time, rather than with more money, because the former will have more time to actually use the PS5, thus deriving more benefit from it. If everybody were perfectly rational, the rich bidders should have already priced that into their price, but I doubt that people are that rational in this circumstance without being able to really prove it.