There has been a lot of discussion about “not worth destroying the economy to save a few lives.” OK, great. I agree.
But, how many lives are “a few.”
Is it OK to kill 50K Americans? 100K? 1M?
What’s the number?
No idea, but it’s got to be more than the number of firearm or smoking related fatalities cause they are just part of the social cost of doing business stateside.
A lot of arguments for/against, but, to summarize my thinking, even for pure economy reasons, less people means less economy. Even one is too much, speaking purely economicaly, if it is some random Elon or Bill. If we are talkin “mexicans” OTOH, couple of them might do?
@yohan_go 6 years since your last post! Wowsers … what brings you back to the side of the angels (or the merely opinionated?
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“Destroying the economy” in order to save lives is not really a thing. When you have destroyed something, it no longer exists. We still have an economy right now - we still expect to have one in 2021.
So to strip away the overly emotive language, what we should be talking about is how much we are willing to reduce the economy, in order to save lives. Or possibly how many years we are willing to set back the economy. For instance, in 2000 the US economy was (inflation adjusted) about 25% smaller than in 2018. So you could think of losing 25% of economic value as ‘setting the clock back to 2000’ (though obviously the effects aren’t felt equally by all people)
The other begged question is whether the economy is likely to shrink more in a scenario of ‘not much illness and death, everybody staying home because they’re told to’ versus ‘death all over the place, everybody staying home because they don’t want to get sick’. We don’t know the answer to that, and it’s not immediately obvious that the first scenario is economically worse.
All that carping aside, figuring out the economic value of a human life is a thing people do. For instance, this article has US government departments putting the value of an individual life as up to $10 million. So using that figure, losing 130,000 citizens is around the same as losing $1.3 trillion (about 6.5% of US GDP). And of course to make a fair comparison, you have to talk about the losses over a whole year, not just four months - if you think that the losses till March next year are likely to be a (fairly conservative) 200,000 then that’s the same as 10% of GDP. And in order to prevent the loss of 2 million citizens (say) it would be reasonable to spend the whole of an entire year’s GDP (though only if the value of money was linear, which it’s actually not really)
At the other end of the scale, if seasonal flu really makes off with about 30,000 US citizens a year then it would be worth $300 billion to prevent that completely or, say, $150 billion to halve the toll (a bit under 1% of GDP)
Of course sages like David Mitchell have already addressed this quandary, though he has yet to update the monologue for COVID-19, but the dry economic sentiment still stands as valid, indeed if not reasonable.
Driving and Death
You’d need to figure in the age of the victim. A babies life might be worth $10 million, but someone who is 80 has already given their value to the economy and their life would be worth little (if you are comfortable quantifying such things—I’m not particularly).
Heh. In a similar vein he discusses drownings here (YouTube).
First off, nobody is killing anyone. Your question is how many people can we save at the expense of the economy. It’s a monetary question. Congress authorized 3 trillion dollars so that’s $8,000 of additional debt for each person in the country. If that saves 2 million people then the cost is 1.5 million per person saved.
Looking at it the way you asked the question we already have an idea of the number of acceptable deaths. It’s at least 60,000 because we have never shut down the economy for people who died from the flu. Maybe that’s the answer to your question of how many is a" few". In the space of a year that would be a rate of 164 per day. We’re above that now and we’ve spent trillions to lower the rate.
Look at airlines and hotels. Neither were shut down by the government, but both have their business reduced because people are scared to use them.
So you need to measure how much business is lost from a government shut down versus consumer reluctance to expose themselves to the virus. But shutdowns make things fairer. Why should a business owner smart enough to understand the risks to employees and customers feel forced to stay open because of competition from business owners too stupid to get the risks?
Banning flights and requiring 2 week quarantines for travelers effectively shut most of them down. That’s a couple bad examples to use.
Otoh, my mechanic stayed open - busiest time he ever had. One of my clients does HVAC for homes - 50% over the same quarter last year.
How many deaths will it take 'til he knows
that too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
the answer is blowin’ in the wind
Point taken. These are government agencies, so they’re probably considering an average citizen age (thirty-five or so, I think?) rather than an infant, so if you’re being cold-bloodedly rational maybe halve or quarter those numbers. Enough younger people have died of COVID that you can probably say on average victims have lost at least 15-20 years of life
The 60,000 number is a bit suspect. See this article. Not to mention, you don’t know you’re going to have a “60,000 year” until you’re in the middle of having it.
This is a little off topic, but I wonder if we killed all Americans, would that lower global warming casualties enough to make it worthwhile?
(Everyone who’s read The Sheep Look Up gets a cookie.)
Trouble is that the premise is already flawed. Minimally it contains a false dichotomy, and it goes downhill from there.
Do the people serve the economy? Does the economy serve the people? The economy is an emergent artefact of people. If there are people, and they interact there is an economy.
What the heck does it mean to “destroy” the economy? Damage to the economy is a proxy for damage to standard of living. For some this might mean not being able to afford a new car this year. For others it might mean the difference between a home and a park bench. Nothing is without ramifications.
The economy is happy when money is moving around, liquidity, confidence, all that good stuff. Lots of people dying is not good for that. It is entirely possible that unfettered, Covid-19 could do more damage to the economy than any amount of lockdown. Part of the reason is that lockdown is artificial. It doesn’t have to cause fundamental changes to underlying demand, and it doesn’t of itself need to bring about changes to the fundamental valuation of things, enough to unravel the intertwining of the economy. Carefully managed control of the economic tuning can, and should, keep the fundamentals afloat. But an uncontrolled infection running rampant, is not going to leave the populace in a mood to accept such control. The danger of a proper uncontrolled meltdown looms. Maybe it doesn’t happen. But this is the problem: you can’t know. You don’t get to run the experiment more than once.
It isn’t about saving the economy. Not unless you are a slogan writer. The economy is just a proxy for the health of a nation. But sometimes some members of the nation are more equal than others.
That’s a bit of a non-argument. We know when we’re having a bad year with the flu. It’s the unknown of how bad it will be that dictates a response.
Not even sure the babies life is worth $10 mill, if there is little/no expectation that they will mature into a contributing independent adult.
Someone recently was telling my wife about how terrified she was for her 90 yr old grandmother in a memory care facility. My personal opinion, that person’s life is worth pretty damned close to zero. Maybe even a negative value. I think this morning’s paper said something like 55% of the deaths (not sure if in Chicago, IL, or US) were folk in nursing homes. Again, my personal opinion is that those folk can be sealed up in their warehouses, but they are essentially irrelevant to the economy (other than the amount of health care that goes to them is obscene, although they do provide menial crap jobs for nurse’s aides, and profit for investors.)
The most challenging factor for me, is the extent to which less affluent folk are disproportionately exposed to COVID. And I don’t know how to address that - let alone to put a price tag on it. I think it disingenuous, tho, to single out COVID as the only way in which the less fortunate are being screwed.
People die. They always have. It has only been the past couple of generations in which we have assumed that medicine should forestall death. I’m not saying we should wish for a return to childhood polio, or death sentences from heart attacks, but it seems as tho we have passed into a stage where people feel that if they are unfortunate enough that something bad happens to them, that medicine will save them - no matter what their age, no matter what the cost.
Society - and businesses - have long put a price tag on lives. I would prefer efforts to create a more compassionate and equitable society, offering greater opportunity for the least fortunate, than pissing away m/b/trillions in the hope of capping the number of people who die from COVID.
And I was not aware that the US or the world suffered from underpopulation. Sure, the death of a friend or family member is a micro-tragedy. Not sure 100,000 or a million deaths - especially of the least contributing - are a macro tragedy,
Dinsdale wrote:
… it seems as tho we have passed into a stage where people feel that if they are unfortunate enough that something bad happens to them, that medicine will save them - no matter what their age, no matter what the cost.
…
And I was not aware that the US or the world suffered from underpopulation. Sure, the death of a friend or family member is a micro-tragedy. Not sure 100,000 or a million deaths - especially of the least contributing - are a macro tragedy.
I can’t believe this, this reprehensible opinion, you are just a, a–oh wait, you’re kinda right.
As probably had to be the case, the response to this whole situation has been quite ad hoc, and assertions are made and policies are implemented without a whole lot of real thinking behind them.
I’m a Liberal, I read Daily Kos (though am less and less pleased these days by its hectoring, negative tone). How about this headline:
COVID-19 is on the rise across the South, as Republicans put dollars ahead of lives
Uh, right, because in the case of this pandemic (though not necessarily in the case of countless other causes of death), absolutely everyone should be saved, and we can definitely do that, no problem. It’s only those nasty Republicans who care about dollars!
I’ve complained on here before about there being no explicit cost-benefit analysis behind the policies. That doesn’t mean they are wrong. I’d just like to see someone talk about the costs and explain that, yes, we are doing this on purpose and we understand the cost (per life saved, etc.) and we think that this is the right course of action.
That’s not what’s happening, for understandable reasons. Political actors (in municipalities, states, provinces, entire countries, etc.) around the world are extrapolating best practices on the fly, imitating each other and advocating and implementing policies in order to, yes, protect people and do good but also cover their own asses. It’s like doctors and the “standard of care” principle: if you do what every other doctor is doing, then you can’t be sued for medical malpractice.
Erring on the side of saving lives comes at fairly minimal political cost because it’s nice and it’s what everyone else is doing. Stick your dick out like Sweden and look what happens. That’s 100% downside.
Note that I’m not a contrarian, at least not much of one, and I think we’re kinda fucked no matter what we do. If we can come up with a vaccine and suddenly protect everyone, then great. We win (sort of). But if we don’t come up with a vaccine, then we’ve just kicked the can down the road, and this thing is probably eventually going to kill everyone it can; we will only have changed the timing of that and “flattened the curve” (which I do think has value). It’s also possible that we will come up with a vaccine like that for influenza that we have to keep altering every year, with varying levels of effectiveness. It’s also possible this thing will become less lethal, like Spanish flu.
It’s a monster of a puzzle and there is no obvious solution to it.
Are you serious with the part I bolded? It strikes me as incredibly myopic. Republicans are in charge and they are making the decision of dollars > people. That’s all there is to that. It reflects poorly on Republicans and makes no mention of Democrats? Tough crap; maybe don’t be the problem.
It’s hard to judge this, to be honest. There are many things that society does that will…not may but will…cause deaths. Alcohol and tobacco spring to mind, or the perennial fight about guns in the US. Hell, the US diet causes a hell of a lot of deaths. These are all things society chooses, for various reasons, to allow. And just with these that I’ve mentioned we are talking about close to 1 million deaths a year, at least that’s my feeling without looking it up.
I think a better question would be…if we do what we are doing, is it really going to save the economy? If we continued what we were doing, would it destroy the economy? Is there anything we could do that would mitigate more deaths while saving the economy and people’s jobs? To me, those are tougher, but more interesting questions than asking for some arbitrary opinion on how many are too many, but that’s just me.