This is such a typical economist thinkpiece, attempting to compute stuff that doesn't exist and drawing wild extrapolations or equivalences so you can put a num

This is such a typical economist thinkpiece, attempting to compute stuff that doesn't exist and drawing wild extrapolations or equivalences so you can put a number, any number, on something. Seriously, look at this paragraph: >Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown. Only in the mind of an economist does this make a shred of sense. Normal people just shake their head and go "wtf, people's lives aren't equal to virtual money that failed to exist". Actually rigorous people shake their head and go "wait, these statistical associations are just correlations and not necessarily transitive, so every time you translate money into outcomes you end up taking intellectual shortcuts that add up until you're spouting nonsense". You need to lack both sensitivity and rigor to put numbers on things like that, a quintessential property of libertarian economists.