Nobody else wants to go down for creating more Hoovervilles than ever thought imaginable. Millions upon millions of lives ruined, but hey we save 100K social security recipients right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville

Oh, then the lagging indicator which are deaths of despair will surely be worth it: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-e...

The virus itself did all this damage. Again, you're conflating the response as being the cause when it's really the virus itself that's the cause. Social distancing and economic shutdown isn't optional at this point; it would all be happening anyway.

Indeed.

By delaying the formal response it would have been possible to get most of of the economic harm of distancing while only getting a small part of the benefit.

Many people started distancing in the couple weeks before the shelter in place orders started. I know people that quit jobs to get away from the public, etc.

Yet many of those people who were increasing their distance, lowering their economic activities, etc. were also living with others who were in denial about the pandemic and where nothing short of a vague threat of citation/arrest or a closure of their hangouts would cause them to reduce their interaction... at least until people they know started dying, which would be too late for intervention (yet at that point they'd still drop out of economy!). In a "no order" world, you'd still get most of the economic hit of that household shutting down-- but they might often still get the infection, contribute load on the hospitals, and potentially die because one member of the household was less responsive to common sense.

Various legal and economic mitigations would also be less likely to exist absent an official response.

That's one explanation for politics, another explanation is that politicians do not care because they are not economically affected by their decisions, they have steady jobs and income, many have significant accumulated assets.

Unfortunately, both options are not mutually exclusive

Every elected official has to care about economic outcomes. Because the electorate cares. Hell, some political scientists think that this is the most prominent issue people vote on. And that's assuming elected officials actually don't care about their responsibilities to their constituents, which may well be true for some, but it's wrong to assume as a blanket motivation (and I'd go farther: it actively aids corruption to cast all politicians in the same mold, because to do so is to lazily shrug off the responsibility of making case-by-case judgments, which is itself what enables uncaring leadership to operate without pushback).

The only thing that might matter more broadly than prosperity/poverty is life and health.

Are you suggesting they’re shutting the economy down just for the hell of it? I can assure you that politicians do not harm the pocket books of their campaign donors on a whim. There is almost no one profiting from this.

I think we can all agree that the shutdown happened because of a genuine concern for what the new unknown virus could do. The last coronaviruses SARS and MERS could wipe 10-20% of the population, so that the baseline to prepare for.

Now we know the virus is not quite as deadly as anticipated (around 2%). And we know the economic impact is disastrous (+15% unemployment in the US after 3 weeks). So the strategy will have to be re-evaluated eventually.

My opinion is that politicians taking the decisions are too remote from people experiencing economic hardship, so they will let the economy get much much worse for way too long.

Or are you too remote from people who would be dying.