1. Timothy Taylor has a useful discussion and links regarding the issue of whether lockdowns have a large effect over and above voluntary changes in behavior.
2. The president told me [Marc Siegel] in a late July interview that he was more excited about therapeutics in the short term even than vaccines. Does that mean he reads my blog?
3. The average daily death rate has trended up recently.
those virus harm estimates come from assuming a $7M value for each of these lives lost, and that I say does seem crazy.
He refers to estimates by David Cutler and Larry Summers of the direct harm caused by the virus vs. the indirect cost of prevention measures. The thrust of Robin’s post is that the cost of the prevention measures was probably higher than the cost of the virus, and that we are “over-preventing” COVID. I want to question that conclusion.
We should be cautious about employing the notion of “lost GDP.” There are two states of the world, one in which some activities have little or no perceived risk and the other in which those activities have a significant perceived risk. The value of “output” for those activities differs under those two states of the world.
Note that most of the prevention measures were voluntary. Many of us are making decisions to restrict travel, social activities, and in-person shopping. Our revealed preferences indicate that the GDP that we are thus giving up is worth less to us than the value of risk prevention.
Think of it as a relative price shift. Valuing today’s output at yesterday’s relative prices can be misleading.
“Note that most of the prevention measures were voluntary.”
That was true going in, not going out.
Here’s an example: many public schools districts around the country tried to go back to some amount of in-person instruction in the last two months, and some already have. Fairfax restarts kindergarten in three weeks, and the anticipated ‘adoption’ rate for some local schools is near 100%. When parents had a choice when it was thought in-person instruction might return much earlier for all ages, about 50% wanted it. In Texas where many districts have been open for in-person instruction for a while, it’s about the same, ranging from about 45% – 70%.
So this indicates about half of the measures are non-voluntary.
Also, my impression is that there is a lot of things people would do *so long as* the venue didn’t impose occupancy restrictions, social distancing, and especially mask-wearing which is not terrible but annoying and takes a lot of the enjoyment out of going out.
There borders between the US and Canada and Mexico have been closed to all but “””essential””” travel for half a year, but the number of attempts and applications remain at record levels. So, a lot of people want to travel, but are prohibited by the rules.
“In Texas where many districts have been open for in-person instruction for a while, it’s about the same, ranging from about 45% – 70%.
So this indicates about half of the measures are non-voluntary.”
+1
Here is North Texas most of the schools have been open for in-person instruction since day 1 of the new school year. For our daughter’s elementary school, roughly 60% opted for in-person vs. virtual. That number just increased even higher after a recent opt-in/opt-out period lapsed.
In our district in suburban Indiana 87% of parents opted for a slightly modified in-school experience over the option of 100% online. 0 kids dropped out of my kids soccer team and almost none opted out of the entire club; that seems consistent with other sports programs. This despite the threat that the season could always be cancelled, as the Spring season was. For the overwhelming majority of parents, it seems, providing their kids a childhood and having a world worthwhile of growing into seems to be more important than the possibility of contagion.
On the other hand, my elementary age cousins in California didn’t go outside for six months, and even now are very limited.
The three kids athletic events with which I am familiar are at 100% with wait lists so long at least one of them had was overwhelmed by two orders of magnitude greater than normal and, not wanting to turn anyone away should they be able to expand or the governor allow them to increase occupancy, had to purchase a special “wait list” software system to help them deal with it. I said had they told me I could have programmed the same thing for them in excel for free in a few hours, and they’ll probably take me up if there’s another need.
This is also not a great proxy, because parents are desperate and hyper-motivated and demand shifts from businesses or activities which can’t or won’t open to those that are open.
That being said, I think a good first-order estimate is about 50/50. There is a big shortfall of demand and about 50% of it is only because of the rules and law enforcement, and 50% is voluntary. So, it’s not right to say that GDP would be the same if the government weren’t imposing these rules, but it’s also not right to say that the drop is mostly not because of those rules.
Note, this is quasi an ‘admission against interest’ for me. I am very much anti-lockdown, and it would be rhetorically convenient for me to blame 100% of the GDP drop and disruption on “the lockdown rules”. But I will concede that’s probably only 50% true, and that the rules do indeed prevent a lot of activity and, I assume, a proportional amount of spreading.
It seems to me that Hanson’s point about crazy low benefits for big costs and based on his very reasonable calculations (also Caplan’s arguments) still easily still survive a 50/50 scenario.
Meanwhile, Cowen tries to position against, but again, every time he gets into an argument with Hanson and Caplan and doesn’t show his work in numbers, my spider sense tells me he’s just positioning to affiliate with mainstream orthodoxy on the issue.
Correction: What I meant to say is that it would be convenient for me to say that 100% of the drop is *not* due to the rules, and fully voluntary.
That is, it would be ok for the state to repeal all the rules and return to legal normality, because vulnerable or concerned people can be trusted to voluntarily protect themselves, but those who felt safe and didn’t want to deal with the mandatory measures could continue to go about their business normally.
Did you say “didn’t go outside?”
That is nuts. How can a child be infected outside? I may be wrong, but I do not know any cities outside of New York that banned going outside at any time.
The parents are just nuts it seems.
Bro, they’re Californian, yeah, they’re a little nuts.
I believe it. I have family members like that. Very high correlation with voting Democratic.
De Blasio was sobering playground in Hasidic neighborhoods shut at the same time he was in mass shoulder to shoulder black lives matter protests.
Your first sentence is what I came here to write, Handle.
The proof is literally sitting in front of Taylor, but he won’t look at it- the various state unemployment rates throughout the entire pandemic to date. This also proves that the policies adopted drove a lot of the behavior in the beginning, and continues to drive it now in a lot of the world.
Deliberately causing a baseless panic has little to do with voluntary risk mitigation.
From an epistemological viewpoint, it’s much worst than what you highlight. Even if there were a sense in what you can argue that “most prevention measures were voluntary”, all our decisions would still have been and are influenced by the government and media’s words and actions to a degree that makes it impossible to assess how voluntary our actions are. Tim Taylor’s question doesn’t make sense when you realize how profound the meddling of government plus media has been and continues to be in our lives with the excuse of the virus, disease, and pandemic. This meddling is not paternalism as some Cass Sunstein and his gang argue, but just vulgar manipulation and coercion.
I hope Arnold understands we are living in a historical moment, one in which the barbarians are trying to grab power by resorting to violence and forcing us to pay the price for attempting to contain them.
To do the analysis correctly, you’re gonna have to conjure an alternative universe where the government and the media take a completely neutral stance vs. the stances that they took (24/7 fear).
People behave quite sheepishly and the data indicate that they vastly overstated the risks of this virus based on what was known or knowable back in March.
Of course, you won’t acknowledge this since it doesn’t fit with your narrative. So, go ahead and provide us with yet another link to a Goolsbee study via Tim Taylor.
I have to agree with Hans here. I “shut down” voluntarily prior to the official shut downs when it first came in March.
But, as the data has come in, it’s pretty clear that people *do not* have an accurate assessment of the real risk profile of most activities. This was known in late May/June that the virus poses very little risk for anyone healthy under the age of 50. Around then, I slowly resumed a relatively normal life.
The media and largely Dem politicians have fed this narrative that defies the data. This fear-based narrative and shutdown is just as unscientific and just dangerous as some on the right’s crusade against masks.
Brazil?
Nah – that probably won’t work. Per capita gdp of like $9k in Brazil vs. like $65k here in the U.S. Apples and oranges in terms of any analysis.
A gruesome thought about measuring “lost GDP” due to Covid-19:
To value the life of any person who is retired (this includes me) at $7m is ridiculous, especially if one is using the ‘lost GDP’ attempt at measuring the loss. We produce next to nothing that is included in GDP. We are drains on the economy. The deaths of elders who are retired, and especially the high-cost elders, are a net gain when it comes to measuring so-called ‘lost GDP’ due to covid-19.
I would take it a step further from your valid analysis. Most of the unfortunate victims would have died of something else within 6-12 months and most of them have other pre-existing conditions. Life basically stinks once you reach a certain age. It’s no fun and death in inevitable. Why we would modify our whole way of life by trying to deny reality is completely lost to me.
+1. Cost to benefit analysis has a lot of advantages, but can easily be taken too far.
On the costs and benefits of retired old people: Many of them provide useful services, working for voluntary organizations–local churches, food pantries, etc.–or helping out their children and relatives. Taking care of the grandkids while the parents have an alone weekend is a major mitzvah.
But the institutionalized elderly are a major cost. One can be crass and say that this is counterbalanced by their “existence value”. Just as many people feel, “I’ll never see the Grand Canyon but I’m glad it’s there”, so they feel, “I hardly see my dad but I’m glad he’s alive.”
And yet … And yet … One of the saddest things is seeing a parent gradually lose their mind, not be able to do this, then that, not remember this, then that, gradually cease to be the person who raised you. This is a big deal because about half of Americans get partial or complete dementia before they die. The sum of human happiness might increase if they died before dementia got bad.
Since it’s almost Halloween, let’s continue the gruesome thought experiment and assume the virus mutates further and pretty much wipes out anyone in some sort of assisted living or over 80 over the next 6 months.
If 50% of Medicare spending spontaneously disappeared it would initially resolve the federal deficit, but wouldn’t it also represent impending bankruptcy for a huge number of healthcare providers?
Seniors might not be producers of a lot of GDP but they certainly are consumers of some of it, especially the roughly 20% of the economy that goes to healthcare.
In a PSST model this could be especially messy, as you could see sharp drop in demand for ~5 years, followed by a return to the status quo ante Covid as young healthy people eventually become old sick people.
This could also create a spending trap similar to cigarette taxes and the 1998 tobacco settlement, since the “Covid dividend” would in practice be a temporary windfall. If $100 billion of annual Medicare demand spontaneously disappeared over the next 3-6 months, it would likely take no more than 2 election cycles for that savings to be spent on new entitlements. And by 2030, the ranks of the elderly and frail would be replenished, and their costs along with them…
David Cutler and Larry Summers are intelligent people, I have read many articles by them.
Perhaps someone can explain to me how they arrived at the bizarre conclusion that a death causes a loss of GDP. (Cutler has made a similar argument before.)
Anyone who visits the memory unit of a nursing home and knows the children who go broke paying for care could not give Cutler’s argument with a straight face.
There must be some economic assumptions that I don’t get.
Indirectly, retired people dying before they otherwise would reduces GDP by reducing incentives of young people to work. If I knew I was going to die at 65, I would work less since there’d be no reason to save for retirement. Of course, if everyone knows it’s a ‘one time die off,’ then it may not affect incentives at all, but a permanent reduction in post-retirement life expectancy would probably reduce young people’s contribution to GDP.
The virus kills people at an average age of 82, and usually with worse than average health for that age.
If you knew that there was a slightly higher chance of dying in your 80s while already sick and living one of those accursed nursing home lifestyles, would that really affect your hustle at 20?
I’m not convinced that these last years of usually in-firmed and often dementia ridden life do anyone any good. If it was more socially acceptable to let go at that point it would probably be a net win for everyone.
asdf, saying what everyone else is afraid to say–or maybe even to think.
If things were strictly voluntary, I think young people would go back to life as normal, whereas older folks would take precautions.
I think parents with small children are split. A lot of them are afraid to send their kids back to school, at least for now.
If the media and politicians convinced everyone that computers caused cancer, many people would voluntarily return to a 1950s economy (ie non digital). This would be a huge cost to society, and it would be voluntary. But we shouldn’t simply ignore that cost just because the change was voluntary, since it was based on misinformation.
A true accounting of the risks of covid for most people, placed in the context of other risks, would not have produced the voluntary changes we saw. Those were caused by media and politically driven panic. We should count that difference between real risk and the panic we got as a cost of our response.
Perfectly stated! And we also need to factor in the long-term, hard-to-measure costs of amplifying ‘safetyism’ to the degree we have here, the long-term health detriments of many people remaining static for a year, detriments to small businesses that were forced to close while ‘essential’ businesses like Walmart or Target remain open, et cetera.
@Josh
Really well put, IMO.
@Ben
RE: safetyism, I’m curious if general levels of caution/vigilance go up, or if it’s more targeted (or if it doesn’t happen at all). Like, maybe folks don’t get more cautious about car crashes, but they do get more cautious about all communicable diseases?
RE: hard-to-measure costs, in a PSST vein, I wonder if the damage isn’t just to individual businesses, but to entire networks/patterns of smaller businesses (I’m sure this has come up in a post or comments before)
Indeed.
Lets state there are three kind of things:
1) Stuff the government has shut down (like schools). This is big, and puts to lie the ideas that the lockdown has ended.
2) Stuff that people aren’t doing but are safe, solely because they’ve been fear mongered. This includes non-economic things like visiting relatives.
3) Stuff that technically is allowed but has been made inconvenient enough not to bother. Like, I looked up an open air scenic train ride that I thought would be fun, but then read that I’d be forced to wear a mask the entire time. Why do I need to wear a mask on an open air scenic train ride? Not because it makes anyone safer. Forcing a face burkha on me for the entire experience made it not worth the trouble.
I would also like to include what a lot of workers have to put up with in their jobs. Why did the lifeguards at my local pool need to wear masks the entire time?
The other day we went to Mount Vernon. While outside on the grounds we had no masks, as did many of the guests. We often passed within 6 ft of each other and nobody paid any mind. The historically dressed people had masks on which immediately strikes you as absurd. When we got to Washington’s tomb the oddest thing happened. There was an employee there in a mask (even though its outdoors). The tomb is outside. It’s less crowded than many of the other outdoor areas since it’s not near the entrance. I approached the tomb while standing reasonably far away from anyone else, farther then most guests had been from each other during the entire afternoon. The employee asked me to put my mask on. I had seen what I needed to see and moved on, and I wasn’t going to give this guy a hard time. It’s sad enough what his job is.
But it’s hard for me to understand who the guy was protecting? Whose at risk from being a fair distance away from me while outdoors? Where they not at risk from me and many other like me during the entire afternoon? What about the giant beer tasting event in a tent with mask-less drinkers right on top of each other near the entrance? Or the restaurant full of people who de-mask when they sit down. Was Washington’s corpse at risk? Was my not wearing a mask some kind of secular blasphemy our dead president needed to be protected from? Somehow I got the impression Washington was rolling over in his grave over all this nonsense.
While I’m thinking about it, might as well link to an alternative point of view from John Tierney:
“Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public.
What experimental drug would ever be approved if there were so much conflicting evidence of its efficacy and so much solid evidence of its harmful side effects? The cost-benefit analysis becomes even bleaker if you switch from the metric favored by journalists and politicians—the running total of lives lost—to the metric that’s typically used in evaluating medical efficacy. It’s called the QALY, for quality-adjusted life year, a wonky term for what we think of as a “good year” of life, free from disease and disability. No politician wants to admit publicly that young people’s lives are more valuable than older people’s because they have more healthy years remaining, but using this guide is the most sensible way to allocate health resources—and it’s long been favored by some of the same progressive health-care experts now clamoring for lockdowns.“
https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-must-end
One reason that lockdowns are so despised is that the officials who impose them all have guaranteed salaries from government, university, or public health agencies.
It would have been better if compensation to workers and entrepreneurs was ordered simultaneously with any shutdowns.
Instead, any compensation was left to unpredictable and equally-privileged legislators.
Perhaps this was unavoidable in the American system of multiple centers of power. But it is no less tragic.
Best take of all, Governor Kristi Noem:
“I’m going to continue to trust South Dakotans to make wise and well-informed decisions for themselves and their families. I’m also asking that we all show respect and understanding to those who make choices we may not agree with. Our trust in the data and in each other has been rewarded. This is a testament to the people of South Dakota – our greatest weapon against this common enemy.”
https://rapidcityjournal.com/opinion/gov-noem-update-on-south-dakota-s-covid-19-response/article_586e2456-23c0-5ba0-bb06-5fc78d084593.html
Were that all politicians were so wise.