I started making a long thread that should& #39;ve been a blog post about the Very Bad Take supposedly serious economics/political journalists have been writing about "the cure being worse than the disease" re social distancing, the economy and Covid-19. I gave up. Here& #39;s a short one.

What& #39;s annoying me is they are supposed to be the people who are plugged into economics and policy and they just clearly aren& #39;t. Why? They aren& #39;t thinking about the counterfactual: excess deaths, and what the benefit of avoiding those is worth.

We (the people doing the actual economics & policy work) use a concept called the Value of a Statistical Life Year. It is a cold, numerical calculation that is used to measure the benefits of things like, oh I don& #39;t know, shutting down the economy to stop a public health crisis

Cities and countries who didn& #39;t take decisive action are seeing ridiculous, tragic increases in overall mortality: not just deaths from Covid-19, but deaths from everything. Eye-watering increases. We can use the VSL/VSLY to put an economic value on all this death.

If we had a week like the UK had a fortnight ago (~6,000 excess deaths), the economic destruction would have tallied $37 billion in current day dollars. That& #39;s about 2% of GDP in a week. It& #39;s equivalent to losing one week& #39;s worth of GDP in one week. Not ideal.

That& #39;s all I wanted to say. These people paint themselves as having the smartest, edgiest take based on capital e Economics but don& #39;t do something as simple as examine the counterfactual to their bizarre, death-laden fantasy world. Fin.