This is just not true whatsoever. E.g. Food supply & medical services are essential. A hat store is non-essential.
And then 3 months later you find out that all of your food supply workers sourced their hats from the hat store and they can't hire more workers because the hat store went out of business. Where did the store get the hats from? Who knows?
Obviously this is a contrived example but just the other day we heard that a flour supplier can't supply enough flour because they don't have enough bags.
Now he has to go through bankruptcy because he was accustomed to the income the hat store generated, so he's decided take a job in a different town where cost of living is lower and the position is lower stress.
Have you read about the pig farmers in Las Vegas that are having a hard time feeding their pigs because the primary source of food was throwaway from strip buffets? There are many non-obvious interconnections in a complex economy.
In a centrally planned economy all supply chains would be stored in one large database and it would be easy to identify all essential supply chains.
> In a centrally planned economy all supply chains would be stored in one large database and it would be easy to identify all essential supply chains.
Not really, because the real supply chain in centrally planned economies is black market.
Instead going to the grocery store, you report to the central planer what you need. It then creates an errand plan, when you should leave your apartment, when to arrive at the grocery store and when you have to leave the grocery store. Thereby making sure that not too many people are at the store during the same interval.
Perhaps we should be thinking high risk and low risk instead of essential and non-essential. A hat store with appropriate distancing measures and cleaning protocols is probably low risk.
That said, by saying the economy is more important than people dying, this is not an either or decision. Do you think thousands of extra dead are good for the economy? What about the health workers, by not shutting down you would essentially put them into the situation where they have to deal with a completely overwhelmed health care system, leading to more dead health workers (the primary reason for dead health workers in China and Italy was that they were so overworked and stressed they could not follow best safety practices).
It is not necessary treat people as toddlers. People are already capable of managing risk and will take precautions as they see fit for their situation. Those who are not able to provide for themselves are most often able to find someone within their community to help.
All decisions at this point have significant downsides. There is no clearly correct answer. Politicians are trying to balance those concerns, and they're trying to do so with extremely limited data and awful models (due to the bad data - GIGO). I don't honestly think anyone knows what will really happen with either the virus OR the economy. It's clear they're just guessing and that's really terrifying.
> Unemployed persons were significantly more likely to die than those in a comparator group; the hazard ratio adjusted for age and other covariates was 1.63, showing that unemployment is associated with a 63% higher risk of mortality. The average effect was higher for men than women with an increased risk of 78% compared to 37%, respectively. Unemployed people in their early or mid careers faced an increased risk of 73% and 77%, compared to 25% for those in their late careers. The risk of death was over 70% in the first ten years of follow-up but fell to 42% after that, although the trend was not significant in the final meta-regression model.
[1] https://www.scie-socialcareonline.org.uk/losing-life-and-liv...
There is an essay from Leonard Reed called I, Pencil [1] that, for whatever reason, everybody who doesn't study economics seems to hate. The essay establishes that even the most simple of things, a pencil, is impossible to understand how it comes to be made.
There are over 7 billion people on this planet. If we go with your definition of "essential" and put everyone else permanently out of work, then we will likely rapidly experience the greatest mass-starvation in the history of the planet.
Even just look at some simple things to understand, such as electricity: how is all of that electrical infrastructure paid for? Cut out all of the "non-essential" uses and you will discover the $/Kw-hour is going to skyrocket and consume a very huge chunk of whatever is left of a rapidly evaporating economy. Then what? Start rationing who is to receive electricity even among the "essential" uses? Is having electricity at home as "essential" as having electricity on a food production line? How is any new venture ever supposed to start under these conditions? Could inventors of a technology as revolutionary as the heat pump find a place in this "essential" definition?
All productive activity contributes to the general wealth of civilization. We may consider some podunk furniture shop "non-essential" to our lives, but the wealth it creates ultimately ends up being applied to other parts of the economy. Even when it is only marginally profitable, the fact that it is paying its bills means that wealth is, on net, being created. Even if you don't consider the products as essential, the wealth creation is, which is to say that all jobs are essential.
I noted, from the beginning, that government did not put forward the standard state-apologist economist to rubber-stamp these economic policy decisions, and cleverly disguised the policies as public safety. My suspicion is that not even those guys were willing to go on record attempting to predict what the outcome of these actions will be.