Maybe we can listen to economists coming out of this too then; On things like
- Healthcare attached to employment
- UBI
- Sick Leave
- Servers wages
- Gig Economy
- Taxation and Austerity
We would have been better off economically if we had listened to much of the general consensus before.
For most of the things you specifically mentioned, there's not much consensus today.
So off by an inch now potentially means being off by miles later on. If the doubling period wasn't lengthened enough, a hospital at 50% capacity will be in serious trouble very soon.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Also poverty lowers life expectancy. If we are not careful about how and when we open the economy back up, we can cost the hundreds of millions of people months to years off their lives. This has to be weighed against the amount of lives that are being saved right now.
This gets ugly fast. How much do you value your life versus how much an economist who has never met you does? Then run that same test on your young child or elderly grandparent. It might be the best measure we have, but it’s a terrible one.
Yes, it's uncomfortable to think about, but that doesn't change it. Would you like your partner, parents or friends to die in a car accident? Of course not. Do you accept the reality of daily deaths of random people by car accidents as part of the price we pay for the quality of life we enjoy? Most likely yes.
But questioning how many deaths per day by cars would be too much, that's where it gets very uncomfortable very fast. Is it a hundred in the US? A thousand? It's certainly not a million or there wouldn't be anyone left after not even a year, but a thousand? And what if 900 of these would be people aged 70 and over?
It's uncomfortable to think about, even more so to say what number you arrive at, but that doesn't make it a thought crime.
The extent of the lockdowns means foot shortages are starting, and massive numbers of people are facing starvation. We're approaching the point where this may end up worse than if we hadn't done any lockdown at all.
Getting a middle-ground between medical professionals and economists would (hopefully) have avoided the worst of both outcomes.
Arguably, that's the job of the policy makers, and worldwide we've seen major failures because it was not carried out as it should (in one direction or the other).
If anything a strong economy provides the least marginal utility to the rich relative to the poor. Once you've got wealth, you have the optionality to properly hedge so that you make money on the way up and on the way down (or at least limit losses on the way do).
Sometimes the calculus is that lives will be lost for the better general well being of society long term. We don't eliminate cars and roads and for people to walk everywhere in order to eliminate motor vehicle deaths. We don't ever lock down to prevent deaths from the seasonal flu.
"Essential work only" is a long way to fall from 21st century American standards of living.
I hate to go all “what about the flu”, but seriously. Tens of thousands of people die from the flu every year. Think about how many we’d save if we just locked down permanently. Or how many auto deaths we’d prevent if we all banned cars. And yet we don’t do either of those things, because as a society we’ve determined that those deaths are an acceptable tradeoff, for, you know, life to go on.
Basically every economist is acknowledging that you can't get the economy back to normal until the health crisis is under control. You can lift the ban on people going to movie theaters and restaurants if you want, but no one is actually going to do it if they don't feel safe doing so. Example: air travel is down 95+% even though there are no laws against flying places.
not a great example. people don't just fly for fun; they are going somewhere to do something. you're not allowed to do most of the stuff that you would travel for in the first place.
The problem is that the only experts we're listening to are doctors and epidemiologists, when we should also be listening to economists. Both sets of people should be in a room together hashing out policy through an adversarial process that charts a middle ground between two bad outcomes.
Flattening the curve to well below capacity at the expense of further suffocating the economy, just means that we're completing ignoring economic externalities that is going to take years or even more than a decade to fully recover from.