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This is kind of a nerd whine, but I really don’t like all these “politician wants to trade lives just to improve the economy headlines.” For two reasons:
First, economic depressions literally cost lives, via suicide, via years of health lost to stress, via medical technology that never gets created, and via things like malnourishment if it gets really bad.
Second, presumably all of us accept some version of lives vs. economy tradeoff, for the simple reason that “the economy” is made of actual people with jobs and lives. For instance, it would probably save a small number of lives to close down all restaurants.
But, we all know how devastating that would be for lots of people who’d lose their jobs and income, so we are willing to make that trade.
It’s uncomfortable to think in terms of tradeoffs like this, but it’s also unavoidable.
It’s uncomfortable to think in terms of tradeoffs like this, but it’s also unavoidable.
The question should be where the good tradeoff is. The fact that some people seem prepared to make a stupid-to-the-point-of-immoral tradeoff isn’t an indictment of cost-benefit analysis, it’s an indictment of people who are prepared to force a lot of humans into a dangerous deal.
(For the record, I think this is in fact what everyone already believes on some level, so it shouldn't even qualify as a Hot Take (tm). But, we're all frustrated, so this sort of thing makes for easy clickbait.)
Small addendum: Part of what rankles is this weird rhetorical posture, where we talk about "the economy" is if it's somehow separate from the behavior of people - like it's some evil bauble Republicans are trying to protect. But the economy is just... us.
