Read on Twitter
This is a good piece. But I find myself increasingly hostile to the economist's way of thinking in this context precisely because it refuses to admit trade-offs between incommensurable values. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-02/coronavirus-why-epidemiologists-and-economists-keep-arguing
I think the way statistical value of life estimates get deployed to estimate the economic value of limiting mass death is intellectually, morally, and politically bogus -- even when I agree with the upshot.
The inherently political nature of human life is what it is precisely because we don't agree about what's valuable, about what's sacred, about what can be permissibly traded off against what.
Emergencies like this demand muscular technocratic management, but technocratic management is basically impossible unless you're relentlessly focused on maximizing a single variable.
But that means you're screwing over some people's fundamental values outside the normal political channels for regulating intractable disagreement and negotiating compromise. This is a cost, too.
Expressing solidarity with others who share our fate by agreeing to bear burdens that don't necessarily protect us personally and will never be repaid probably promotes a social ethos that has some economic value, but that's not why we should do it.
We should do it because we really are in it together, it's what we owe to one another, and it's noble, admirable, and right. If we can't see it that way, we won't get the material benefits that do in fact redound to this kind of cooperative, mutually protective social ethos.
