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I don't really want to engage with most of this. I think you need to appreciate that there is very little daylight between your kind of points, which might very

I don't really want to engage with most of this. I think you need to appreciate that there is very little daylight between your kind of points, which might very well be in good faith, and the approach of someone who just engages in what-about-isms with an intent to occlude debate and distract people from the urgency of implementing blunt solutions that do a lot of good. The latter is a particularly cowardly form of debate, where people suggest various forms of possible counterpoints and allude to certain controversial conclusions that they just never quite say out loud. Just to highlight one point that I think is often missed. Comparing the "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" to the "cost of lockdown" is a frequently abused argument - partly because of bad faith, but in other cases because people legitimately miss that "ending the lockdown" doesn't mean that people will all of a sudden leave home. There is a portion of economic cost, and I won't engage in trying to size it right now, because I tire of this, that will remain just from people being rational self-actors. Restaurants will still close, schools will be reduced attended, etc. Because of the virus. So the comparison is to compare "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" (and we know there are sufficient idiots out there to drive spread in this case; it doesn't take a lot to have large effects) to "saved marginal cost if lockdown ends".

tripletao 6y ago
I understand the impulse to reveal truths selectively in order to guide people to the correct short-term action. I think it's incredibly dangerous, though. That's basically what policymakers did early in the pandemic when they advised Americans that masks were ineffective. Perhaps they got their short-term action, conserving scarce masks for medical workers; but now the shortage is over, and people (a) still aren't wearing masks, and (b) have lost considerable faith in the public health authorities in general. Hard to judge, but I suspect their noble lie saved hundreds of medical workers or patients at most, and will kill tens of thousands of Americans over the next year. Those policymakers were trained professionals, so I doubt I'm any better at picking and choosing what truths should be spoken. So especially in a forum of moderately sophisticated readers, I'm not inclined to limit myself. I understand that may sometimes superficially look like things people often say in bad faith, but I hope readers expend the effort to distinguish. In any case, I certainly agree that the coronavirus has tremendous societal and economic cost independent of the mitigations. That doesn't mean we still can't make it worse, though. I'm perhaps more optimistic than you are that Americans can do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities, and actually wear masks properly and cooperate with other mitigations short of lockdown, with the right (perhaps coercive) guidance. I hope you weren't too close to the earthquake, continuing the apocalypse bingo.

tripletao 6y ago

I understand the impulse to reveal truths selectively in order to guide people to the correct short-term action. I think it's incredibly dangerous, though. That's basically what policymakers did early in the pandemic when they advised Americans that masks were ineffective. Perhaps they got their short-term action, conserving scarce masks for medical workers; but now the shortage is over, and people (a) still aren't wearing masks, and (b) have lost considerable faith in the public health authorities in general. Hard to judge, but I suspect their noble lie saved hundreds of medical workers or patients at most, and will kill tens of thousands of Americans over the next year. Those policymakers were trained professionals, so I doubt I'm any better at picking and choosing what truths should be spoken. So especially in a forum of moderately sophisticated readers, I'm not inclined to limit myself. I understand that may sometimes superficially look like things people often say in bad faith, but I hope readers expend the effort to distinguish. In any case, I certainly agree that the coronavirus has tremendous societal and economic cost independent of the mitigations. That doesn't mean we still can't make it worse, though. I'm perhaps more optimistic than you are that Americans can do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities, and actually wear masks properly and cooperate with other mitigations short of lockdown, with the right (perhaps coercive) guidance. I hope you weren't too close to the earthquake, continuing the apocalypse bingo.