The Herd is a magnificent book, not so much about Sweden's inspired and scientific response to Covid in the face of many panicked countries, but as a scientific summary of the epidemiology literature and as a confirmation of the Swedish High Chancellor's comment from the 1640s to the effect of "Do you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" It also acknowledges that "the individual's calculation is not the same as that of the state." Libertarian anti-vaxers have a point, although one suspects the majority are merely conspiracy theorists anyway.

Emotional Arithmetic is a Canadian film around three holocaust survivors meeting after many years; it concerns the impact their experiences had on the rest of their lives. The book and the film share an implicit evaluation of the worth of lives. Nevertheless, the book and the film throw up a strong contrast between the deep understanding of the implications of decisions held by the protagonists in The Herd, compared against the mixture of callous indifference, personal sacrifice, and pure chance that led to the survival of the protagonists in Emotional Arithmetic.

Here in 2025, the news is dominated by the global chaos arising from politicians in the USA, plus wars in Ukraine and around Israel. How little wisdom indeed! Frankly not just absence of wisdom, but sheer corruption, which amounts to taking advantage of the lack of wisdom of voters.

Perspective is something few people possess. The highest daily death toll attributed to Covid in the Spring of 2020 in Sweden was 118, yet 275 people could be expected to die on any normal day. A contemporary (online) conference noted that the world death toll attributed to starvation was 2 million, while between 0.2 and 0.3 million could be attributed worldwide to Covid across the same period. With or without lockdowns, the planet was coping with Covid quite well... but lockdowns did a lot of damage that had nothing to do with Covid. A survey conducted by a global consultancy firm discovered that people in countries such as the USA, UK, France, & Sweden on average believed that the fraction of their population dead of Covid was two orders of magnitude larger than was actually being reported. Most answers were only 10x high, so the median was not so bad. Such ignorance is expected of Americans (and they won the contest with 225x), but not so much of Brits and Swedes.

Anderberg comments, as the figures of Covid-19 emerge, that "Another way of looking at the pandemic was that measures taken to combat it had frozen a lot of the functions in society that many exposed and vulnerable people struggled to be without." I quite enjoyed the first almighty NZ lockdown; I got to look at Hamilton as vacant of people as in The Quiet Earth, and I got a chance to refine my battery measurements that enable Waikato's battery work. The damage to teaching at schools and university was evident, but fear precluded alternatives. A large number of QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life-Years) were squandered. They simply did not appear on any spreadsheet in New Zealand (and many other lands).

I would like to see a requirement that anyone seeking office should have at least a degree from a reputable university in either Economics or Physics. As in Sweden, institutions like the national health service should be independent of, and not subject to orders or interference from, the elected government, as it is with the judiciary and the reserve bank. Finally there should be a mechanism by which the people can force a government out; this was the intent in the U.S. Constitution when it guaranteed a right to bear arms, but something like a plebiscite forced by popular demand might cause less collateral damage.

Sweden was well down the list of countries ranked by deaths per capita by various different methods, when the final tallies came in. Remarkably, President Trump had been right in what he said about Covid and the correct national response, despite having made over 21 thousand misleading or false statements in the time of Covid, according to the Washington Post. (Sheer luck?) Like prohibition, the extreme lockdowns proved to be a failed experiment.