“Seen versus the unseen” is the framing device the Bob Zadek Show uses to weigh a policy’s visible costs against the costs that never reach the front page. In the episode that treats the concept directly, guest host Charlie Deist attributes the idea to Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French political theorist and economist, and applies it to the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. The episode’s guest, historical kinesiologist Ron Jones, supplies the unseen side of the ledger from the archival record of the 1918 influenza pandemic and from physical-fitness testing. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Bastiat’s parable of the broken window
Deist introduces the concept as a recurring theme of the program, noting that Bob Zadek often refers to Bastiat. He recounts the parable of the broken window: a miscreant child throws a rock through a shop window, and the immediate reaction is that this will boost economic activity, because the glazier must be paid to replace the window and the spending then circulates through the economy. The fallacy, as Deist describes it, is that the account neglects what the shopkeeper would otherwise have done with the money — he has less in his pocket to spend on more productive things. The seen cost is the broken window and the glazier’s fee; the unseen cost is the foregone alternative. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Deist then maps the parable onto pandemic reporting. The seen costs — people dying and getting sick — are, in his words, on the front page every day. The unseen costs are the ones he says policymakers need to turn their attention to in making trade-offs. He argues that deference has been given to unelected health officials who are not necessarily looking at the big picture, because their whole career has been about identifying infectious diseases; for them, he says, the pandemic is like an astronomer who has a solar eclipse in their home country, an opportunity to put all of their knowledge into practice. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
The unseen side: fitness, posture, psychology
Jones, a credentialed physical education teacher, gives the unseen costs concrete numbers. He says that if the 1930 standards for physical fitness are applied to today’s athletic children, those children test around the 30th percentile compared to the 1930s. He reports putting his own son, an athletic basketball player, through the vertical leap and finding he tested at the 30th percentile. Jones asks whether a child in the 30th percentile of math, reading or science would be acceptable, and notes the comparison was brought to him by a mentor who was a physical therapist for 40 years. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Jones frames technology as the driver of that decline. He describes the amount of sitting and doing nothing but twirling your thumbs as something that does not build the immune system, and warns that technology is often invented to solve a problem created by previous technology, so it is not the end-all solution. He directs the warning at those rushing to technology as the savior for education during the pandemic, saying it might solve the temporary problem of not being able to get children into schools physically while creating other issues — not only mechanical postural issues but psychological ones. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
On the psychological side, Jones draws on the 1918 record. He says there was great concern over the public’s emotional state in 1918 after just four or five weeks of lockdowns, with people described as literally losing their minds after four, five or six weeks of restrictions, shutdowns and quarantines. He contrasts that with the months and approaching year of restrictions in 2020, and predicts the psychological impacts will be deep and will take decades to get through, if we get through them. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
The 1918 comparison
The episode’s 1918 material supplies both sides of the ledger. On the unseen side, Jones notes that many cities extended hours at playgrounds or opened parks for extended hours on the theory that the safest place for children was still outdoors. He describes parks that were developed in a lot of cities and served as places of social engineering — not just places to flop around, but sites with libraries and physical education teachers who taught children how to play, mixing free play with technical instruction and bringing together different races and religions. He says a lot of those places were eventually closed too, and mentions a photograph published on a database website showing people packed into a San Francisco park with their children, though he says he does not have the specific date. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Jones also emphasizes hygiene, fresh air and ventilation as concerns in the 1918 period, noting that books in his office from a hundred-plus years ago said the same things people were saying in 2020 about the need for better ventilation. On the question of whether lockdowns worked, he says there is still debate among experts who study epidemiology and the history of pandemics about the efficacy of masks and social distancing, and cites comments by panel experts at a 2006 conference who were not quite sure the distancing was that effective. His own conclusion is that no single strategy would work; if it was going to work, all of them had to be done at the same time and very quickly. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
He contrasts the speed of 1918 decision-making with the 2020 response. Jones says leaders in 1918 came together and took action within a 24-hour period, citing meeting after meeting of commissions or community leaders where decisions were implemented within 24 hours, sometimes 48, despite there being no cell phones and no internet. He describes Seattle being shut down so fast that people wandered the city at night stunned, and says Utah shut the whole state down, including church services. He notes pushback then as well, especially when saloons were left open, and says he found the saloons were providing cheap meals to industrial laborers in tenement housing who needed a place to eat at night, not just drink. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Jones closes with the pandemic’s aftermath: it blasted through the population, was called a hit-and-run disease, lasted two to six weeks, and did not have an economic impact in terms of a severe recession or depression. He acknowledges people lost money, that some who died were breadwinners, and that there were orphan issues, but says the country went into an amazing period of growth for 10 years until the Great Depression. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Policy trade-offs and essential liberty
Deist ties the concept to the book Essential Liberty: Finding Freedom in a Post-COVID World, which he describes as featuring interviews Bob Zadek conducted with thinkers from economists to public policy makers on the question of what a proportional response looks like. He says that if policymakers follow the suggestion that actions saving even one life are worthwhile, the result is a very different world than if one sits back and rationally assesses the appropriate balance. He also mentions an interview in the book with Alex Tabarrok, an economist and blogger at Marginal Revolution, who made the point that classical liberals and libertarians have a bias against government action but do not want government out of the picture altogether, and that certain things would be expected from a functioning government. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Deist also raises the question of individual risk calibration, citing a tweet by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot showing people enjoying themselves at the Lake Michigan waterfront with a message asking whether they understood there was a pandemic. Deist argues this neglects people’s ability to calibrate their own risk, noting that most people have done some research or absorbed news coverage, perhaps getting a sense that things are riskier than they are, and still go out while maintaining distance or wearing a mask. Jones’s summary of the lessons is to think beyond COVID — to consider the overall effect on the immune system of everything happening, and to argue that staying inside and not going outside will make things worse. He also questions whether one blanket strategy for every region of the country is the right way to go, noting that regions and cultures differed and that some places let people out of restrictions without a second round of shutdowns because they did not think people could handle it emotionally. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020)
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts — the August 14, 2020 installment with guest host Charlie Deist and guest Ron Jones — treats “seen versus the unseen” as a topic, so the excerpts show no development of the concept across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the title or holding of any case, the name of any bill, or the amendment any measure turned on. They do not give the founding date of Bastiat’s parable, the date of the 2006 conference Jones references, or the specific date of the San Francisco park photograph. The episode’s introduction breaks off mid-sentence, so whatever Deist was about to say about where the country was heading is not in the record.