6 ms·
It's easy to contextualize. 50 million human years lost means that people would have to put in 50 million human years worth of work to recover the economic loss
by xwdv 5y ago
It's easy to contextualize. 50 million human years lost means that people would have to put in 50 million human years worth of work to recover the economic loss of COVID-19.
Consider the average human worker. In their life, they will output around 10.5 human years worth of work.
50 million years represents the total output of about 4.76 million human lives.
So if you delete the production of 3 million people due to COVID deaths plus all the time spent in lockdowns, 50 million human years lost sounds about right, but probably could be higher. I'd say it's probably about 80 million human years lost.
- germinalphrase 5y agoPerhaps the value of a human life is that they are alive, not the hours of work they produce during that lifetime.
- bb611 5y agoValuing people as primarily their economic output is anti-social to the point of being dystopian, and we have much better economic indicators than arbitrary heuristics when we do want to understand the economic damage of the pandemic.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoRight. Think of this as "50 million years of opportunities for grandchildren to get to know their grandparents or 50 million years of time spent as a widow after your elderly husband dies" as well as just the economic cost.
- Polygator 5y agoThis assumes that the lost human years are productive years, which I think is dubious at best given the demographics of Covid death. We could count "years of productive work lost", but that feels like a very cynical way to look at it.