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I started making a long thread that should'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's a short one.
What's annoying me is they are supposed to be the people who are plugged into economics and policy and they just clearly aren't. Why? They aren'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't know, shutting down the economy to stop a public health crisis
Cities and countries who didn'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's about 2% of GDP in a week. It's equivalent to losing one week's worth of GDP in one week. Not ideal.
That's all I wanted to say. These people paint themselves as having the smartest, edgiest take based on capital e Economics but don't do something as simple as examine the counterfactual to their bizarre, death-laden fantasy world. Fin.
