I'm supposed to start this with the standard nobody's perfect/we've all made mistakes boilerplate, but I'm not going to. I have never screwed up as badly as Hassett. I very much doubt that anyone reading this has either. And yet, other than a few jokes at his expense, he seems to have paid no price. His post Dow 36,000 career seems to have been one long concatenation of sinecures.
That's a problem.
There needs to be a consequence for being wrong, a penalty, a demotion or at the very least a loss in credibility until we see proof that a lesson was learned. If we don't demand that damaged reputations have to be rebuilt and lost trust has to be regained, the screw-ups will just get bigger and more dangerous.
Incredibly depressing case in point.from Philip Rucker.
So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.__________________________________________
Many 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, according to six people briefed on it.
Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.
For Trump — whose decision-making has been guided largely by his reelection prospects — the analysis, coupled with Hassett’s grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis.
UPDATE:
Like this took me 45 seconds and it seems to match the description of the "cubic model" quite well. pic.twitter.com/s91O6CTkw1— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 5, 2020
